Miller was in many respects a minority photographing the minority. The first female photographer as well as one of the first artist’s to capture the new international era in countries such as Egypt and Romania, Miller documented Paris, New York, Egypt, war torn Europe, concentration camps, Hitler’s apartment and post-1945 London.

Lee Miller’s career broke the gender and racial barriers of her time as she became an acclaimed photographer in all areas: Surrealism, commercial, travel, fashion, portrait, documentary and, for Vogue, the first female photographer and correspondent to enter war zones. Miller’s Surrealist Paris pictures, 1929-32, vary from architecture to Salavador Dali and Picasso and the emerging diversity of the time. Black and white portraits show a maharani gowned in a white dress, headscarf and jewelled bangles, and Miller’s future husband Aziz Eloui Bey, the Egyptian Director-General of the Ministry of Railways, Telegraphy and Telephones. Miller’s work in Paris charts the rising feminist atmosphere and sexual freedom for women. The exhibition includes what are considered some of the most radical nudes in the Surrealist movement in which the models become abstract shapes often associated with phallus imagery. Most famously amongst Miller’s works is a picture of a severed breast on a plate in what is thought to be a comment on the objectification of women.

The exhibition follows Miller’s move to New York in 1932, where, despite the Depression, she joined the materialistic age of celebrity portraiture, fashion and advertising. These photographs include a documentation of the setbacks and successes amongst minorities of the time. The exhibition includes Miller’s portraits of the all-black singing cast of Four Saints in Three Acts, a groundbreaking avant-garde opera. In the 1930s Miller moved with her husband to Egypt, where, as one of the first foreign photographers in the country, she produced documentary photographs that arguably remain some of the most original seen to this day. The collection couples the old with the new, refusing to reflect the commercial images we now associate with Egypt. Just as Miller shows the diverse and new within Europe and America she explores the foreign within Egypt, showing Westerners in what she calls ‘The black satin and pearl set’, and providing the dual vision of a visitor and a resident. The images of urban life are similar to the Paris photographs, and, in their echo, draw together international arts and cultures.

The Surrealist photographs of the desert create something bold and unusual that hints of the future, showing ruins, sand dunes and rock formations that are made so otherworldly they are reminiscent of space travel. The only photograph of a pyramid is not the thing itself, but a vast triangular shadow falling across the city. The exhibition also houses the most famous of Miller’s Egypt pictures, Portrait of Space, an image of the dunes and desert seen through the torn gauze of a window that best encapsulates her Surrealist eye.

Miller documented blitzed London, charting the dismantling of the capital city and its rebuilding post-war for a new era. In Women with fire masks, Downshire Hill, London two young women wearing black gas masks turn to the camera with the poise of Miller’s fashion photographs, becoming surreal blinded figures. In other beautiful yet haunting images, Miller shows Auxiliary Territorial Service girls silhouetted against great spotlights in Night Life Now, destroyed University College London in the reflection of a puddle, and, in Revenge on Culture, a statue of a nude man in a bombed street. In the later images of post-war London Miller conveys the atmosphere of a change about to come through deserted streets and electrified fairs that hint at the onset of modernity. Miller’s chilling war photographs show surgeons, soldiers and shelled towns.

Following the Allied victory Miller went into concentration camps and Hitler’s apartment. Miller’s haunting photographs from the camps of the deceased and newly liberated, as well as killed and ‘suicided’ SS guards and their families, are as shocking now as they were then. In another unprecedented turn, Miller followed the troops into Hitler’s apartment, where, before witnessing its destruction, she and Sergeant Arthur Peters took photographs of themselves in the small, dull rooms: lying on the Fuhrer’s sofa, using the Hotline, and bathing in the tub.

Thoughtfully presented and with over 140 photographs this exhibition gives one of the great female artists of our time rightful recognition for her stunning record of the diverse, materialistic, violent and beautiful brave new world of the twentieth century.