Lee Miller’s retrospective at Tate Britain is lengthy overdue

Not lengthy earlier than Tate Britain opened photographer Lee Miller’s largest retrospective to date (2 October 2025-15 February 2026), I travelled to her former dwelling, Farleys House, tucked away within the Sussex countryside. Miller and husband Roland Penrose created a surrealist haven upon shifting there in 1949, spending the following 35 years filling the house and gardens with up to date artwork. Friends and artists Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington had been frequent guests, leaving their mark. Picasso daubed a smiley face on the tiles above the Aga, whereas Joan Miró absent-mindedly twiddled wine-bottle wrapping right into a sculpture, which sits within the eating room.

The home reveals a heat, sociable facet of an artist who could be onerous to outline. Born in New York in 1907, Miller was adept at reinvention; someday mannequin, vogue photographer and acclaimed struggle photographer, she shied away from discussing the final – her son, Antony Penrose, solely came across the actual fact after her demise in 1977.

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)

At Farleys, there’s a much less severe Miller than the surrealist artist who outlined a brand new period of images. Here is a girl who cared deeply for her work and household, and loved cooking and entertaining. Her cookbook, on sale within the reward store at Farleys, unites creativity with culinary aptitude (her ‘green green chicken’, with a pea and parsley sauce, was a contented accident, whereas ‘goldfish’, a baked codfish, is garnished unusually with carrots and butter).

Miller’s long-overdue retrospective at Tate Britain shifts the main target again to Miller’s standing as an experimental, proficient and multifaceted photographer. Becoming within the medium throughout her time as a mannequin within the Nineteen Twenties, Miller appeared on the covers of British and American Vogue. Through a friendship with Vogue chief photographer Edward Steichen, Miller met Man Ray and supplied her companies as an apprentice – he politely declined as he was leaving to go on vacation; undeterred, she joined him. Their ensuing private {and professional} relationship was outlined by technical experimentation, which included the invention of the solarisation method that she occurred upon whereas creating a picture of a feminine nude for Man Ray. Images, when uncovered to mild throughout processing, took on a reversed mild impact. Here, her pictures are outlined by dramatic mild and shadows, eschewing the standard studio set-up and presenting a stark avant-garde ode to distinction.

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)

After time in Paris and New York, the place she established her photographic apply, Miller married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo. Her pictures there epitomise the sideways, wholly distinctive means wherein she approached her topic. When capturing the Great Pyramid of Giza, she averted capturing in profile, as a substitute specializing in the pyramid’s shadow because it lengthened throughout the town beneath. The work is putting in its stark juxtaposition of the traditional with the trendy.

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)

The crux of the exhibition rests on Miller’s very important position as a struggle photographer. Following the tip of her marriage and the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller left Egypt to {photograph} war-torn London for Vogue. Frustrated with a way of helplessness, she was decided to seize scenes from the entrance line, preventing to turn into one of many uncommon feminine accredited struggle correspondents. Alongside good friend David E Scherman, she was one of many first to achieve the just-liberated Dachau focus camp. Her pictures of the lifeless, of the captured officers, of the collaborators are uncooked with the advanced notions of proper and unsuitable, and are indisputably among the most necessary works of the twentieth century. You can’t look away.

Lee Miller at Tate Britain, from 2 October to 15 February, tate.org.uk

Farleys House and Galleries are open to the general public from April to October annually, farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)

(Image credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)