Lee Miller did not take the photograph for which she is most famous - sitting upright in Hitler's bathtub in 1945. The far less celebrated photojournalist David E. Scherman was behind the lens. Contrary to popular belief, the photo was taken in Munich, not Berlin, and Hitler's suicide had not yet been announced. Much of the received wisdom about this iconic image is wrong.
Tate Britain's comprehensive and devoted tribute to Miller (1907-77) aims to correct more than just this myth. The exhibition seeks to establish Miller as a lifelong artist - an American photographer who began as a model, then became a muse, before creating the dense, dark war photography that she seemed to disparage in her final decades. Miller had tucked away these works in the East Sussex farmhouse she shared with her husband, historian and curator Roland Penrose. Surprisingly, the exhibition's success has little to do with most of the photographs themselves.
What did Miller photograph during the war? Her lens captured a wounded soldier being loaded like a crumpled airmail letter into the mouth of a warplane. She documented artillery spotters lying low on a honeymoon bed in the Hotel Ambassadeurs in Saint-Malo. In Leipzig, she photographed the Bürgermeister's daughter sleeping on a couch, mouth half open to reveal remarkably pretty teeth, as Miller noted - except that the young woman had just taken cyanide.
Miller's wartime imagery reveals the full horror of conflict. Nazi guards in Buchenwald kneel beaten on cell floors. Liberated prisoners scavenge through rubbish heaps outside the camps, one reading a letter rescued from smoking pyres. Tears appear to stream down the stony face of Justice holding her scales - a monument still standing in the ruins of Frankfurt in 1945. Miller's photographs are deeply ambivalent, sometimes piercing and profound, sometimes conspicuously stylish, perhaps because she was working for Vogue magazine. Even an SS officer drowned in a canal outside Dachau looks as if he is still modeling Nazi chic.
While Miller's war photographs are justly renowned, it is her documentation of the aftermath that truly stuns visitors to this exhibition. She captured ailing children, alone, hungry and without medicine, on the wards of Viennese hospitals. "For an hour I watched a baby die," she wrote. "He was the same color as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss's Danube." In Hungary, barefoot girls in dead men's coats beg for bread, one of them darting a look of recognition at the equally beautiful photographer. A soprano in utility dress performs a Mozart aria to no one at all in the roofless wreckage of Vienna Opera House.
"If I could find faith in the performance of liberation I might be able to whip something into a shape which would curl a streamer and wave a flag," Miller wrote to her editor. "I, myself, prefer describing the shattered morale and blasted faith of those who thought 'Things are going to be like they were.'" These dispatches home to her editor, and the texts Vogue never published, are featured throughout the show. They are tremendous pieces of writing, often more eloquent than the photographs themselves.
Miller's written accounts reveal her keen eye for detail and her ability to capture the surreal nature of post-war Europe. A fine shot of a law student leaning fetchingly on a cafe table was supposed to show Paris resurgent after the occupation, even though tanks were still smoldering around the corner. "The bullet holes in the windows were like jewels," Miller wrote, "the barbed wire in the boulevards a new decoration." From high above a wintry street, she witnessed the execution of László Bárdossy, fascist ex-prime minister of Hungary. "He held his beaky grey face high and his gestures were taut," she recorded. "He waved his hand refusing the blindfold. The four gendarmes who had volunteered for the execution stood in line and awaited the order. Bárdossy's voice orated in a high-pitched rasp, 'God save Hungary from all these bandits.'" Miller's photograph shows exactly this moment, though the convict is barely visible.
The exhibition's presentation at Tate Britain is problematic in several ways. Miller's photographs - black and white and always small - are dispersed across vast empty galleries. There are comparatively few war images displayed, and the concentration camp photographs are both limited and relegated to a discreet room. This approach seems entirely counter to the urgent telegram Miller sent to Vogue in 1945: "I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE." Instead, the show unfortunately turns to post-war celebrity photography. The exhibition includes yet more shots of Picasso performing for photographers, images of his abandoned mistresses in posthumous misery, and additional photographs of topless surrealist wives.
Mark Haworth-Booth's excellent 2007 exhibition at the V&A focused primarily on Miller's reportage for Vogue. However, this current show attempts to present her entire life story, of which perhaps too much is known compared to the work itself. The exhibition covers her wild and traumatic childhood, the moment she was saved from Manhattan traffic by Condé Nast himself (sparking her career as the modern girl - tall, slim and crop-haired), her Paris years with Man Ray, marriage to an Egyptian husband in Cairo, and her later life with an English art world figure in Sussex.
This biographical approach means visitors see more images of Lee Miller than photographs by her, particularly in the first two galleries. The early fashion spreads she shot for Vogue in the 1930s look indistinguishable from contemporary work, and calling her photo-booth prints "self-portraiture" seems like a stretch. Her pre-war photographs are thoroughly average - out of focus, clichéd and cramped, with no keen sense for the decisive moment. Often slavishly imitating the surrealists, viewers would hardly know who had taken them.
But once Miller broke free - perhaps from Man Ray's influence - so did her art. Shoes made from tires in Romania in 1938 find their desperate counterpart in scraps of fabric worn by prisoners in Buchenwald. Typewriter keys fall silent, shattered during the London Blitz. Out of the doors of a bombed church pour congregations of bricks, like the streams of words that were never printed but memorialize Lee Miller as much as any image. Both her photography and writing would diminish by the 1950s, as she retreated to her kitchen and garden in Sussex. Today there might be a clinical diagnosis for her condition, but Miller understood herself best: "I never got the scent of Dachau out of my nostrils."
The Lee Miller exhibition runs at Tate Britain in London until February 15, 2026. Despite its curatorial flaws, the show ultimately succeeds in revealing Miller as more than just a famous face or war photographer - she emerges as a complex artist whose most powerful work documented humanity at its most vulnerable moments.
