Tate Britain staged the most extensive retrospective of Lee Miller yet seen in the UK, about 250 prints from Surrealist Paris and Vogue fashion to the war and the desert.
Tate Britain in Millbank showed the photographs of Lee Miller, Vogue’s Second World War correspondent, from Thursday 2 October 2025 to Sunday 15 February 2026. It was the most extensive retrospective of her work yet staged in the UK.
Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. She was one of the most sought-after models of the late 1920s before she moved behind the camera, working in Paris alongside Man Ray.
She became a figure in the Surrealist circles of New York, Paris, London and Cairo. After her marriage to an Egyptian businessman in 1934 she photographed the desert, and Portrait of Space, made near Siwa in 1937, shows it through a torn fly screen.
For Vogue she covered the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. On 30 April 1945 David E. Scherman photographed her in Hitler’s bath in Munich, her boots still muddy from Dachau.
The exhibition followed that career in around 250 vintage and modern prints and gave space to the lesser-known Egyptian landscapes. Tate Britain organised it with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago.