From Muse To Witness: The Extraordinary Life Of Lee Miller

When Vogue photographer Lee Miller crossed into war-torn Europe and proved with her stark, black-and-white photographs of the Nazi concentration camps how the people were suffering during World War ll, her magazine did not print the pictures, because they would be too distressing for readers.

The courageous woman, who believed that as a journalist it was her duty to bear witness, did not flinch when faced with terrible scenes of war crimes and cruel deaths, and today, some of the photographs that were published and others that were found in the attic of her home after her death show how compelling and profoundly impactful her war photography was and how it fearlessly documented the excesses of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.

Lee, a film on her life directed by Ellen Kuras, in which the redoubtable Kate Winslet plays her, is now streaming (on LionsgatePlay) and is important because it gives a female war correspondent her due place in the journalistic firmament. At a time when there were few women in the all-boys’ club of journalists, and the ones that managed to crash the room were given soft 'feminine' assignments, Lee Miller not just responded to the sneering Cecil Beaton (well-known photographer) by taking great pictures but pushed herself into the forbidden zone of war photography.

Apart from the excellent film, there have been documentaries and books on her—one by her son Antony Penrose, on which the Kuras film is based—and the Tate Britain in London has organised a vast new Lee Miller exhibition (that runs till February 2026), the most comprehensive display of the late American photographer’s work ever held in the UK. Reported Charlotte Jansen in The Guardian, “It’s an overdue account of a remarkable artist whose dazzling, daring career had more than a few twists: from Vogue cover girl to Vogue photographer; from surrealists’ muse to pioneer of the movement; from commercial portraitist to war photographer. Some of Miller’s fabled work is here, including her famous portrait in Hitler’s bathtub, her boots—dirtied with mud from Dachau concentration camp—strewn symbolically on the floor. The exhibition builds a sense of the dizzying, sometimes frenzied energy of Miller, who could photograph fashionable hats as well as Nazis who died by suicide. Yet, as her work turns abruptly in subject matter over the decades, swinging from frivolity to devastation, it is never jarring—and never boring.”

More retrospectives of Lee Miller’s work are being planned that “reflect a modern mainstream reawakening" to Miller. They also highlight a growing realisation: that “she was, arguably, the most fearless photographer of the 20th century,” according to Arwa Haider in bbc.com. Tate exhibition curator Hilary Floe spent three years immersed in Miller's work for this show. She told the BBC: "What unites these vast and sprawling bodies of work that [Miller] creates? These three words kept haunting me: fearless, poetic, and surreal."

When Miller went to the combat zone, along with David Scherman of Life Magazine, the UK did not permit women to go to the war front, which is when her American citizenship came in handy. Before the war, Lee was a fashion model living a bohemian life in France when she met and fell in love with Roland Penrose. She moved to London with him and gained employment with Vogue during World War ll, photographing Britons during the Blitz. Miller captured the devastation on the streets with a striking aesthetic. Her perspective was very different from that of her male contemporaries. She shot, with her compassionate point of view, ordinary women and their undervalued contribution to wartime society. In the film, Cecil Beaton is shown disapproving of her photos—particularly one of women’s underwear drying on a clothesline—but as a woman, Miller has an eye for the ordinary, which she then shoots with an artistic flair. She has the support of the editor, Audrey Withers, but even she is unable to fight for Miller’s more shocking pictures to be published.

After the Normandy landings in 1944, Miller photographed combat during the Battle of Saint-Malo and inadvertently recorded the first wartime use of napalm. During the Liberation of Paris, she clicked members of the French Resistance humiliating women accused of collaborating with the Germans. Her photographs from Dachau included the train of corpses and of a family that committed suicide in their home—she wanted to show the full horror of the war to a disbelieving public. The film faithfully—and chillingly—recreates Miller’s most iconic photographs to convey not just her fierce determination, but also the emotional toll she paid for her commitment to uncovering the truth.

Winslet, in a commanding performance, plays Miller with a lack of vanity, her face showing courage, fortitude and empathy, particularly towards women—the young girl who looks angry and stricken as the baying mob shaves her hair, and the child who looks terrified even of kindness because of the brutality she suffered. Miller's artistry grew out of her own experiences and her unrelenting humanism that would not let her ignore the small moments of trauma that deserved to be shared with an apathetic world. She channels Miller’s defiant spirit, particularly the constant fight against sexism and the needless barriers that sought to keep women out of combat zones.

Following the war, her professional reputation declined, and she became a largely forgotten figure. She struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism and spoke little about her war experiences. She moved away from professional photography and focused on becoming a celebrated, award-winning gourmet cook in the last two decades of her life. To those who did remember her, she was often recalled as "just someone who had once been a fashion model." She is reported to have said that she’d rather take a picture than be one.

When Emily LeBarge of the New York Times asked Miller's son how she would have felt about the show at Tate, he said she just would have wondered what was coming next. “For Lee, it was the travelling and not the arriving that was important.”

Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author.