Lee Miller begins in Paris in 1929, when Miller entered photography through Surrealism, and follows the expansion of her practice from experimental compositions to travel pictures and wartime reportage. Published by Hatje Cantz in 2015, this 160-page survey presents a photographer whose changing subjects were matched by a persistent attention to the unstable character of appearances.

In her early work, close cropping and technical experiment isolate ordinary motifs until they acquire a paradoxical, estranged presence. Images made in collaboration with Man Ray belong to this formative period, yet the book keeps Miller’s authorship and development in view. Her travel photographs broaden the field: experimentation is not treated as a sealed chapter, but as part of the visual intelligence she carried into encounters with places, people, and events.

That continuity becomes especially consequential in the photographs Miller made as a war correspondent crossing Europe at the end of the Second World War. She recorded the crimes revealed at Dachau and Buchenwald soon after the camps were liberated. In Munich, shortly afterward, she was photographed in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub—an image whose staged intimacy, historical timing, and political charge resist any simple separation between document and Surrealist gesture. The publication places such widely different pictures within the same career, allowing formal invention and historical witness to be considered together.

For a serious photography collection, the book’s value lies in the breadth and clarity of that account. It brings Miller’s early Surrealist practice, collaborative methods, travel work, and historically significant war photographs into a concise bilingual German-English volume. Rather than reducing her to a single role or celebrated image, Lee Miller offers a focused basis for examining how an experimental photographer responded to the upheavals of her century.