Lee Miller review, Tate Britain – Seeks to rescue the artist from her role of iconic beauty and muse

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 30th September 2025

Miller was seen as a 1930-ish glamour girl until the posthumous discovery of her photography archive. It revealed that she was an accomplished photographer. When working with Man Ray in Paris, the “presiding spirit” of their work seems to have been his. After that, though, she emerges as a “high end, classic modernist”. Working as a war photographer, her cool eye produced some of that century’s most distressing images. For her, says one writer, “beauty and brutality had equal weight.”