Paris, 1929, is the fulcrum of Lee Miller. Man Ray: Fashion – Love – War. It was there that Miller and Man Ray began a relationship that would move through the roles of teacher, lover and, eventually, friend. Rather than treating Miller as a supporting figure in Man Ray’s biography, the book places their work side by side and examines the mutual influence that shaped their photography during and beyond their years together, which ended in 1932.

Published by Skira in 2023 for an exhibition in Venice, the volume brings together approximately 140 photographs by the two artists, supplemented by artworks and documentary material drawn from the Lee Miller Archives and Fondazione Marconi. Its scope follows Miller across her changing public identities—model, Surrealist photographer and war correspondent—while retaining close attention to her independent practice. Her wartime reporting, including her confrontation with the horrors of liberated concentration camps, gives the book’s account of fashion and intimacy a stark historical counterweight.

The most revealing material concerns authorship and exchange. Miller and Man Ray’s experiments with solarisation became so closely entwined that photographs by Miller were sometimes attributed to him. Their personal history therefore serves not as anecdotal background but as a framework for reconsidering how artistic reputations are constructed. Man Ray’s portraits of figures including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí broaden the view to the Surrealist circle in which their partnership unfolded.

Texts by the curator, Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane and her son Anthony Penrose add familial and scholarly perspectives to the visual record. For collectors, the book’s importance lies in this comparative structure: it gathers major strands of Miller’s career while setting her in direct, sustained dialogue with Man Ray. As an exhibition publication and a study of collaboration, attribution and historical visibility, it offers a more balanced account of two connected yet distinct photographic practices.