Lee Miller At Tate Britain
- Theodora Exarchos
- 58 minutes ago
- 5 min read
“I was practically brought up in a dark room.” That’s how Lee Miller described herself, and it arches the perfect doorway into her exhibition at Tate Britain. My morning there whirled me into an uncovered world of a photographer, whose exhibition gloats over 200 vintage and modern prints: unflinching, authentic, and, until now - never seen before.
I had never heard of Miller nor seen a single photograph of her’s, but Tate Britain's retrospective felt like a narration that spoke for itself through photographs instead of words.
The exhibition is arranged almost like the chapters in her story. One of the first photographs to greet me upon entry were multiple nude portraits of Miller's torso, hazy, dreamy and arresting at once; nonetheless, a crafted statue of the intimate. Born in New York in 1907, “in front of a camera”, Miller's father put her in front of a lens from a young age. Miller possessed an androgynous look evoking the 1920s shift in femininity: short hair and a novel, masculine attitude to life. Her decision to shorten her name to Lee was a bold statement reflecting such, stepping out of the expectations of the cookie cutter “model” (of a woman) into something more evocative and authentic - she soon realized she would rather be behind the camera than in front of it.
In the 1920s, she moved to Paris, where eighteen year old Miller worked alongside Man Ray. From this her true love for surrealism awakened, soon to be internalised as a trademark artistic choice of hers. Man Ray pulled her straight into a new avant garde realm of solarisation, strange shadows, light reversed into halos. Miller manages to capture the glossiness in the mundaneities of the everyday. Some highlights included the sheen of perfume bottles in a shop window, her reflection peering back at me, and “Woman with Hand in Hair”, a tender, almost lullaby-esque image, never shown before. It felt like an echo of her girlhood suspended in time.
Each room elegantly and meticulously unfolds a new era of Miller’s legacy. In a shadowed room, I found myself enchanted by Cocteau’s iconic surrealist film Le Sang d’un Poète that Miller projected on the wall, flickering gracefully in black and white. Play acting - part muse, part experiment.
In 1932, Miller set up her own studio upon returning to New York City, showcasing playful portraits from Charlie Chaplin stirring beneath a chandelier to a frenzied Leonora Carrington, images all reflecting her flourish in the capital's bustling art scene. Her address book soon filled with artists, writers, and filmmakers, it was clear Miller’s lens had a rare ability to package spontaneity into deliberate expression.
Following her liberation from the rigid demands that came with being a New York photographer, the exhibition progresses to unveil her previously unseen commercial work, from Cairo in the 1930s. There she became deeply intertwined in the arts and culture scene, she pranced around with high society cliques, and relished a new artistic freedom. Her glimmering photographs “reimagine wild landscapes” (Tate Britain), expanding into sceneries that feel more spacious and edgy despite their simplicity. Portrait of Space (1937) is notably most striking, a mosquito net torn opening into the sea, naively evoking a peaceful window into an aquatic sanctuary of Miller's new-found autonomy.
When World War Two raids the world, Miller evolved into one of the leading fashion photographers for Vogue London; the exhibition features multiple magazine spreads ranging from then-fashionable hats to the importance of a lady’s posture. But she rapidly discards the sugar-coated fantasy to turn her lens on a catastrophic reality. Her portfolio captured an array of Blitz-stricken corners in London: Holborn, the iconic Burlington Arcade, and the hauntingly collapsed ceiling of University College London. Her work You Will Not Lunch in Charlotte Street Today (1940) was truly harrowing - symbolic of the nation’s devastation, bleeding with a ghostly sense of loneliness that cuts into the viewer. Images leaked with rawness, realness and a raging grit. There is no attempt to stage beauty, a true reflection of Miller's humble disposition.
The 1940s war photography and post-war era, (“Revenge culture,”) really struck a chord within me. One image bears a fallen brick crushing the breast of a marble statue, an emblem of womanhood and progress, violently interrupted by battle. It felt almost like an allusion to the nudes posed for in her youth, but this time absolutely fractured and brutalised.
Her post-war work feels stripped back and suffocated: minuscule sized images parallel to the minuscule hope of the time. The scarred children in hospitals and orphanages illustrate the images as heavy with symptoms of PTSD. Her intention behind such debilitating and grave depictions was to shatter the euphoria of “liberation” and stress the disillusionment that followed the end of the war.
What I found to be the most profound part of the exhibition was in one of the last few rooms, where strictly no photographs were allowed. As one of the very few accredited, female war correspondents, Miller travelled with Allied troops across Europe and risked her life doing so. The images she brought back are challenging to digest, but impossible to keep your eyes off of. Ruined cities, German concentration camps, and the tragic faces of battle and survival all staring mournfully and provokingly back at the viewer. Darkly fascinated by the documentation of Miller's invasion of Hitler’s private space, the infamous photograph of her in the dictator’s bathtub was disturbing. Confronted by a sickeningly vivid visual of boots discarded on the shower mat, Hitler’s portrait lurking above a curled up mirror in the shower was taken the very same day as the announcement of his suicide. Miller showered, and even slept, in that very same room. Her impact on seizing the mundane intimacy of Hitler’s “normality” - the simple acts of bathing or resting - become disturbing reminders of human capacity. This dark irony is the backdrop of ordinary comfort, set against the mind of unspeakable cruelty.
Following 1945, she eventually abandons photography altogether and retreats into her Artistic Mecca home in Sussex. The exhibition displayed her newly-adopted hobby - cooking, showcasing absurdly bizarre recipes, like marshmallow cola and an upside-down onion cake sprawled over magazine pages.
Miller didn't attempt to dazzle the audience with aesthetics; she forced the camera to grapple and tackle, and it is that confrontation which has become the beauty of her work. Tate’s exhibition of Lee Miller’s oeuvre is worth a visit, as it is both educational and a time capsule, nobly resurfacing her iconic print collections which were, prior to the exhibition, long locked away in her attic.
Edited by Darina Babacheva, Photography editor
