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).