Photographer, model and artist through a fresh lens

A new retrospective at the Tate affords Lee Miller wider recognition for her Surrealist artistry

- Mark Hudson

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.