Tate Britain is currently running the UK’s largest-ever retrospective of famed photographer and photojournalist, Lee Miller. But for the full experience, you’ll also want to visit Lyndsey Ingram’s Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime.
This more intimate exhibition, in the heart of London, was curated by Clara Zevi and organized in collaboration with the Lee Miller Archives.
The exhibition will showcase 34 photographs by the prominent New Yorker, whose incredible life was recently brought to the big screen in Kate Winslet-led biopic Lee.
A portion of the proceeds from the exhibition will directly support the conservation of Lee Miller’s photographs, as well as the founding of a charity to preserve Farleys – Miller and Roland Penrose’s East Sussex home.
The exhibition covers the photographer’s return to Paris in 1929 to the end of the Second World War, and is said to explore the role that theater, staging and performance played in her work.
In 1925, an 18-year-old Lee left New York to study at a technical theater school in Paris, L’Ecole Medgyes pour la Technique du Théâtre, run by French-Hungarian artist Ladislas Medgyes. She returned to New York the following year to attend Vassar College. Despite still being a student, she was asked to lecture on contemporary European theater.
In 1929 she would return to the French capital and thus would ensue a remarkable 15-year period of her life, where she was heavily involved in the surrealist movement, formed a lifelong bond and indeed collaborated with Man Ray, and photographed the Second World War as a correspondent for Vogue.
It’s this incredible period of Lee’s life that Performance of a Lifetime delves into.
Lyndsey Ingram is currently showing Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime at 20 Bourdon Street, London, England. The exhibition runs until February 25 2026.
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If you want to find out more about Lee Miller and her incredible work, here's the remarkable story of Lee Miller. "No women were going as photographers – they couldn't even get accreditation" – Kate Winslet talks Lee Miller biopic. Did you know? Lee Miller's son was tricked into thinking Kate Winslet was actually his mother in biopic due to her skill with a Rolleiflex camera.
