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 turned to Lee Miller for its autumn 2025 exhibition, which ran from Thursday 2 October 2025 to Sunday 15 February 2026 and was the most extensive retrospective of her photography 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 and becoming 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 a desert landscape seen through a torn fly screen.
In the Second World War she became a war correspondent for Vogue, covering 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. She died in East Sussex in 1977.
The exhibition followed that career from her part in French Surrealism to her fashion and war work, in around 250 vintage and modern prints, some never displayed before. It gave space to the lesser-known Egyptian landscapes, and it was organised by Tate Britain with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago.