Unlike Horst, Helmut Newton and Cecil Beaton, who meticulously and preciously catalogued and filed away their archive of photographs for posterity, Lee Miller was less careful with hers. Much of her early work was lost in New York, thrown away by the Germans in Paris, or bombed and burned in London during the blitz. She did squirrel away the prints, negatives and ephemera she had managed to keep, on her Sussex farm in the English countryside, but she never felt the urge to relive those memories. She hid away, even from her son, her early lives as model, artists' muse, war photographer, fashion photographer and writer. It is only now, 30 years after her death and 100 years since her birth, that Miller's work can be judged beside that of her peers in a major retrospective at London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Her son, Antony Penrose, the boy photographed on the knee of the elderly Picasso in the exhibition, has made it his mission to see Miller's work rightfully acknowledged. Miller once described her turbulent life as broken up like 'a water-soaked jigsaw puzzle, drunken bits that don't match in shape or design'. The beauty from Poughkeepsie, New York, first graced the cover of American Vogue in 1927 before she became Man Ray's apprentice and model. But Miller was a lot more than what many curators had dismissed her as: Man Ray's muse (and lover). As Penrose and Mark Haworth-Booth, the show's curator and author of the accompanying book The Art of Lee Miller, go through her photos to piece her life and career together, a different picture of Miller emerges. For a start, she moved from the cosseted world of a fashion model into the bohemian world of art and then into the horrors of war photography. Miller was one of only six accredited female journalists, and the only official female photojournalist in combat zones during the second world war. The shocking sights she witnessed left her wounded. She suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, blighting her latter years with depression and alcoholism. Two images in the exhibition leap out for their uniqueness. One is of her sitting in Hitler's bath in his Munich flat with the boots she wore only days earlier as she trod around the death camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, placed neatly on his bathmat. The second is of two models sitting in an Anderson shelter wearing fire masks. 'The image is part documentary, part fashion photograph, with a combination of surrealism and comedy about it,' says Haworth-Booth, 'because one woman is dangling a whistle as if one blow would stop the blitz, or even stop the war.' It wasn't a message people wanted to see and the photograph was never published. What were published were her harrowing photographs from the death camps, in American Vogue. It would be hard to imagine seeing such pictures in the magazine today, but Haworth-Booth wanted to show these photographs by Vogue's most prolific photojournalist (more of Miller's war photography was published than Beaton's). But he didn't want to aestheticise these images of the dead by hanging them on the wall, so they are displayed in the way they would have originally been seen, in the magazine. Up to the day she became an official US Army war correspondent, Miller was photographing fashion on the home front, taking pictures of models on the rain-soaked streets of London. Fashion provided an important psychological boost to women's morale during that period. Some of Miller's pictures of bomb damage meanwhile show a heightened surrealist sensibility, such as a shot titled Remington Silent, which shows a bashed-up typewriter, as if making a comment about war's assault on culture. As Penrose says of his mother's preparation for the destructive force of war and the jubilation of survival: 'The only meaningful training for a war correspondent is to first be a surrealist - then nothing in life is too unusual.' Miller could have returned to New York at the outbreak of war but, she said, 'I owe everything to Europe. I've got to stay.' She originally arrived in Paris in 1929 with the express purpose of working with Man Ray, one of the key players in the French surrealist movement. He had departed for his summer holiday, but she found him in a nearby cafe, marched up to him and said: 'Hello, I am Lee Miller, I am your new student.' She already knew much about studio photography from her work as a model, but Man Ray taught her new techniques, a new way of looking at objects and their juxtaposition. They became close collaborators to the point where they often did not maintain individual ownership of images - which at the time was a surrealist ideal. Hanging together in the exhibition is a Man Ray portrait of Miller, next to her portrait of him and next to that a photograph on which they both collaborated. They also discovered the process of solarisation that became a signature of their work. Miller said she was working in the dark room when something, perhaps a mouse, crawled across her foot. She rapidly switched on the lights and realised her exposed pictures were being ruined so she put them in the fixer bath immediately. The result was solarisation. There are a few shots of Miller on display which have the metallic ethereal quality rendered by the technique. The depth and significance of Miller's work was practically unknown before this exhibition. She had never sought recognition, although Haworth-Booth says perhaps that is because she didn't live long enough, for acclaim came to her peers such as Bill Brandt late in their lives. At times the exhibition claims Miller's work should be judged next to her surrealist friends such as Man Ray, Cocteau and Picasso, but with exception to her landscapes of Egypt where she lived in the 1930s and her collaborations with Man Ray, the surrealism of her work leaves less of an impression than the grim reality, seen from a woman's perspective, that she recorded during the years of the war. That is her legacy. The Art of Lee Miller, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Ends Jan 6
