WHAT? Lee Miller

WHERE? Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

WHEN? Now until 15 February 2026

WHY GO? For a snapshot of a legend. She was muse and lover to Man Ray, friends with Picasso and Henry Moore, and partied with the likes of Max Ernst and Joan Miró. The beautiful, free-spirited Lee Miller could have lived a charmed life as a model but chose instead to push herself to the limits as a war photographer, swapping the Ritz for the Blitz, where she saw the full horrors of life on the front line.
An extraordinary collection of Miller’s photographs, many never seen before, has been curated for this powerful exhibition that finally pays tribute to her outstanding achievements.
Arranged chronologically, it charts her life — from Vogue to Surrealism, where she and Man Ray broke barriers — through her travelogues in Egypt to the gritty wartime images that are now perhaps her most surprising legacy.
The iconic photograph of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub (1945) is well-documented, but less well-known are her distressing images of concentration camps that convey her fearless investigative approach as a photojournalist. These harrowing memories account for Miller’s later, more reclusive life, when she likely suffered PTSD.
This was all played out in the recent film Lee, with Kate Winslet — portrayed accurately, according to her son Antony Penrose, who keeps his mother’s memory alive at Farleys House & Gallery in Sussex, their family home for 35 years before she died in June 1977.

IN THE KNOW Miller fully embraced the Surrealist movement and worked with Jean Cocteau on his avant-garde 1930 film Le Sang d’un poète, where she performed as a statue that comes alive. Enduring great discomfort, it’s a feat that would defy any model today — don’t miss the film clip accompanying the main exhibition.