A comprehensive new exhibition featuring the work of Lee Miller, the late American photographer, has opened as the most extensive display of her art ever held in the United Kingdom. The ambitious showcase presents Miller as an unapologetically bold and inventive artist whose remarkable career included numerous dramatic transformations: from Vogue cover model to acclaimed photographer, from surrealist muse to movement pioneer, and from commercial portrait artist to wartime correspondent.

The exhibition features some of Miller's most legendary works, including her iconic self-portrait taken in Adolf Hitler's bathtub. In this powerful image, her boots—still covered with mud from the Dachau concentration camp—lie symbolically scattered on the bathroom floor. The display captures the intense, sometimes frenzied energy that characterized Miller's approach to photography, demonstrating her ability to shoot fashionable hats one day and document Nazi suicides the next.

Despite the dramatic shifts in subject matter throughout her decades-long career, swinging from frivolity to devastation, Miller's work maintains a consistent vision that never feels jarring or boring. The exhibition strategically begins with Miller's own 1927 Photomaton self-portrait, where she poses wearing the cloche hat that would later become iconic when she appeared on Vogue's cover. While the show only briefly references that her father, an amateur photographer, began using Miller as a model—sometimes nude—from age eight, it doesn't explicitly discuss the sexual abuse she experienced as a child.

The first gallery chronicles Miller's brief but impactful modeling career, featuring photographs by renowned artists Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Cecil Beaton. These images gradually transition into Miller's own pictorialist-influenced self-portraits, some of which were published in Vogue with Miller credited as both model and photographer. This progression illustrates her evolution from subject to artist, showcasing her deep understanding of beauty's complex and sometimes harsh nature.

Miller's relationship with Man Ray arguably altered the course of art history, though Man Ray typically received the credit for their collaborative innovations. The exhibition dedicates an entire room to their joint work created between 1929 and 1932, filled with luxurious surreal and dreamlike images. These photographs feature languid pictures of necks, torsos, and breasts while exploring themes of power and subservience. A striking triptych shows Miller wearing a BDSM collar while Man Ray appears in a grandfatherly sweater, clearly indicating who held the real power in their relationship.

During the early 1930s, Miller reached her peak as both a masterful printer and experimental artist. The exhibition quietly reattributes what is believed to be the first artistic use of solarization in photography to Miller rather than Man Ray. This technique, originally developed in the 1840s, involves briefly exposing the negative to light during processing. The landmark image "Primat de la Matière sur la Pensée" showcases Miller's crucial role in this innovation—a sublime vintage print of a nude female figure where the solarization effect makes the body appear to dissolve into the background, creating an aureole-like mystical effect where the image's beauty seems to consume itself.

Equally experimental are Miller's Paris street photographs, representing the apex of surrealist photography. These works feature vertiginous camera angles, distorted perspectives, and reversed images designed to confound and perplex viewers' vision, creating spellbinding effects. Miller established her own vocabulary of surrealist metaphors and motifs, showing particular fascination with statues—fixed, immobile, and voiceless figures that perhaps represented what she most feared becoming herself.

The exhibition includes previously unseen works, such as sensuous desert photographs taken in Egypt and Syria while Miller lived in Cairo during the 1930s. Newly discovered wartime photographs are also featured, including an image of opera singer Irmgard Seefried performing an aria amid the ruins of Vienna's opera house. These discoveries continue to expand understanding of Miller's diverse artistic range and geographical scope.

As a war correspondent, Miller positioned herself as close to frontlines as authorities permitted, capturing mushrooming clouds of napalm, makeshift surgical operations in muddy Alsatian fields, and brittle buildings during the London Blitz. Her photographs from the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, taken just weeks after their liberation in 1945, are deliberately presented in a separate gallery space. These images document some of the 20th century's most distressing scenes, including a close-up photograph of a bashed-in face of an SS guard beaten by former prisoners, captured with pitiless bright flash photography that conveys little sense of retribution or justice.

Following what she witnessed at the war's end, Miller's relationship with photography gradually diminished, and the exhibition reflects this decline. The final room displays portraits of Miller's famous artist friends, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Man Ray, and Dorothea Tanning. While these later works lack the electric ingenuity of her earlier portraits, they suggest this artistic community provided Miller with her greatest comfort and belonging.

By the time Miller died in 1977, she had hidden most of her photographic archive in an attic, turning her attention to an entirely different pursuit: gourmet cooking. This final career change represented yet another surprising transformation in her multifaceted life. While Miller embodied many different roles throughout her lifetime, this comprehensive exhibition ultimately proves that above all else, she was a true artist whose contributions to photography and surrealism deserve recognition and celebration. The exhibition runs at Tate Britain in London from October 2 through February 15.