Lee Miller

A comprehensive look at the work of the groundbreaking photographer, foregrounding her importance as a surrealist artist. Lee Miller (1907–77) assumed many roles over the course of her remarkable life – from avant-gardist to commercial photographer to war correspondent and photojournalist – and to each of these roles she brought her unique artistic sensibility. Though she was intimately connected with many of the leading figures associated with surrealism, including Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst, and participated in major exhibitions of her time, Miller was also at times marginalised in the art world as a woman and as a photographer in an era when photography’s status as an art form was not widely accepted. Her genre-bending work incorporated portraiture, fashion, still life, landscape, reportage, and advertising: fearless, poetic and surreal, it reveals a world of uncanny beauty and sensual ambiguity – often with a humorous edge. Drawing on new primary research, Lee Miller