Photographer and surrealist Lee Miller gets a long-overdue retrospective at Tate Britain

Not long before Tate Britain opened photographer Lee Miller’s largest retrospective to date (2 October 2025-15 February 2026), I travelled to her former home, Farleys House, tucked away in the Sussex countryside. Miller and husband Roland Penrose created a surrealist haven upon moving there in 1949, spending the next 35 years filling the home and gardens with contemporary art. Friends and artists Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington were frequent visitors, leaving their mark. Picasso daubed a smiley face on the tiles above the Aga, while Joan Miró absent-mindedly twiddled wine-bottle wrapping into a sculpture, which sits in the dining room.

The house reveals a warm, sociable side of an artist who can be hard to define. Born in New York in 1907, Miller was adept at reinvention; sometime model, fashion photographer and acclaimed war photographer, she shied away from discussing the last – her son, Antony Penrose, only came upon the fact after her death in 1977.

At Farleys, there is a less serious Miller than the surrealist artist who defined a new era of photography. Here is a woman who cared deeply for her work and family, and enjoyed cooking and entertaining. Her cookbook, on sale in the gift shop at Farleys, unites creativity with culinary flair (her ‘green green chicken’, with a pea and parsley sauce, was a happy accident, while ‘goldfish’, a baked codfish, is garnished unusually with carrots and butter).

Miller’s long-overdue retrospective at Tate Britain shifts the focus back to Miller’s status as an experimental, talented and multifaceted photographer. Becoming interested in the medium during her time as a model in the 1920s, Miller appeared on the covers of British and American Vogue. Through a friendship with Vogue chief photographer Edward Steichen, Miller met Man Ray and offered her services as an apprentice – he politely declined as he was leaving to go on holiday; undeterred, she joined him. Their resulting personal and professional relationship was defined by technical experimentation, which included the discovery of the solarisation technique that she happened upon while developing an image of a female nude for Man Ray. Images, when exposed to light during processing, took on a reversed light effect. Here, her photographs are defined by dramatic light and shadows, eschewing the traditional studio set-up and presenting a stark avant-garde ode to contrast.

After time in Paris and New York, where she established her photographic practice, Miller married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo. Her photographs there epitomise the sideways, wholly unique way in which she approached her subject. When capturing the Great Pyramid of Giza, she avoided shooting in profile, instead focusing on the pyramid’s shadow as it lengthened across the city below. The work is striking in its stark juxtaposition of the ancient with the modern.

The crux of the exhibition rests on Miller’s vital role as a war photographer. Following the end of her marriage and the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller left Egypt to photograph war-torn London for Vogue. Frustrated with a sense of helplessness, she was determined to capture scenes from the front line, fighting to become one of the rare female accredited war correspondents. Alongside friend David E Scherman, she was one of the first to reach the just-liberated Dachau concentration camp. Her images of the dead, of the captured officers, of the collaborators are raw with the complex notions of right and wrong, and are indisputably some of the most important works of the 20th century. You can’t look away.

Lee Miller at Tate Britain, from 2 October to 15 February, tate.org.uk

Farleys House and Galleries are open to the public from April to October each year, farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk