What can Miller exhibition tell us about artist-photographer?

Lee Miller’s life reads like some hallucinatory fairytale: the suburban girl from Poughkeepsie, New York, who parachuted into some of the 20th century’s most explosive moments. From Vogue model to Parisian surrealist, to acclaimed war photographer present at the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald, Miller ended her life as the chatelaine of an English country house; albeit one of the quirkiest kind — Picasso was a house guest.

“She seemed to know everyone, everywhere,” says Hilary Floe, curator of a major Miller retrospective, her largest to date, opening at Tate Britain on 2 October. Indeed, the apparent glamour of the photographer’s life, combined with her personal beauty, might make Miller’s story feel more suited to this paper’s style pages than its arts — yet there’s a distinctly dark undertow to Miller’s life, hinted at in a 1960s newspaper interview.

“It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you,” she had said. That one brief sentence establishes several key Miller characteristics: a feisty readiness to take on life’s challenges, an acknowledgement that some difficulties may have been of her own making, and a hint at her capacity for myth-making, which becomes increasingly evident as you read further into her story.

As we celebrated World Photography Day recently, the rediscovery of neglected women Surrealists has become a growth industry in recent years: the formerly little-regarded English painter Leonora Carrington is now as highly rated as her sometime partner, the once titanic Max Ernst. Miller might seem hardly in need of rediscovering, having been the subject of innumerable major exhibitions since her death in 1977, not to mention a musical, and most recently a lavish biopic starring Kate Winslet. Yet even to viewers relatively well-versed in Surrealism, her name is likely to evoke one of many luminous portraits of Miller by her lover, mentor and collaborator Man Ray, rather than one of her own works.

Under the dream-like cast of Ray’s signature solarisation technique — in which over-exposure creates a simultaneous appearance of positive and negative — Miller appears perhaps the ultimate Surrealist siren. The Tate’s exhibition, as Floe makes clear, aims to rescue Miller from the role of muse, while exploring the collaborative nature of these iconic images. “She’s been seen from so many perspectives, such as the pretty girl who inspired great men — and much as it’s discredited you still hear it,” says Floe. “There’s a sensationalised, biographical approach focused on the couple’s mutual passion. I think they both took lovers during this period, which doesn’t mean anything, because they were Surrealists — but a focus on the story tends to sideline her art.”

A more recent approach, then, projects Miller’s work as a proto-feminist riposte to Ray’s quintessential male gaze. But that, Floe says, “undersells the depth of their creative connection” and fails to account for Miller’s own recollections that she and Man Ray “were like one person when we were working” — that it was impossible, even unnecessary for them to know exactly who had done what in each work. “That challenges our ideas of creative inspiration,” says Floe, “our need to always attribute a work to a single person.”

There is evidence, explored in the show’s catalogue, that it was Miller rather than Ray who was responsible for the discovery of solarisation — in one telling, she was distracted by a mouse running over her foot at the moment the paper should have been withdrawn from the developer. Floe, though, wants to shift the focus beyond the “undoubtedly extraordinary images” Miller produced alongside Ray, towards her “long and rich body of independent work”. While there have been numerous previous shows on Miller’s roles as fashion and war photographer, historical figure and Surrealist icon, the Tate’s will be the first major exhibition to frame all these activities as aspects of Miller’s own art.

Born Elizabeth Miller in 1907, the daughter of an engineer and a nurse, her trajectory was marked from the outset by trouble and extraordinary happenstance. She contracted gonorrhoea at the age of seven, following a rape by a family friend, and was discovered aged 19, by Vogue founder Conde Nast when he saved her from stepping in front of a car in a busy Manhattan street. In typical Miller fashion, this encounter exists in many versions, but in all of them it leads to a glittering modelling career, which she interrupted in 1929 to head to Paris with the idea of enlisting as Man Ray’s pupil.

After curtly informing her that he “didn’t take students”, Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia 1890), proceeded to fall head over heels in love with Miller, and she with him. Far from being some starry-eyed dilettante, Miller had already taken courses in avant-garde theatre design, interpretive dance, theatrical design and painting, all of which fed into her “extraordinary ability to perform for the camera”, as Floe puts it, “her skill in co-creating Ray’s images of her, and projecting her force into them”.

For all the change and transformation it brought on, this period lasted only three years. “Miller seems to have packed nine simultaneous lives into that brief time,” Floe says. “She continued to model at a very high level, starred in Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet, participated in avant-garde photography exhibitions all over Europe, while also working as a medical photographer.”