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Lee Miller, Tate Britain (until 15 February 2026)
Prodigiously talented, frighteningly charismatic and strikingly ambitious; whatever other qualities Lee Miller possessed, they have always played follow-up to one thing: her beauty. To acknowledge this fact is to understand the impetus of Miller as an photographer — to trace a line from the Poughkeepsie model to the Vogue war correspondent, from the muse to the master. She said, at one point, “I suppose I see people as beautiful”, and there is something there, in the “I suppose”; some uneasiness, some discomfort with the concept itself. Perhaps, when you are so beautiful, you wish to share it around, lonely at the feast; perhaps, tired of being desired, you wish to enact that same gaze on the viewer. Miller’s beauty was of a diaphanous, moonlit kind; a fitting emblem for her longing to reflect, to cast back in flashbulb and chrome. “I'd rather take a picture than be one,” she also once said. To speak of her beauty is also to put front and centre the manner in which she interrogated, utilised and resisted the same quality in her work, particularly in her documentation of atrocities.
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