Lee Miller

If you were one of the few women photographers accredited by the U.S. Army at the start of World War II, chances were you were far from the frontlines. Military regulations at the time dictated that female photojournalists, unlike their male counterparts, were not to enter combat zones. But, the Poughkeepsie-born photographer and noted Surrealistoperating as British Vogue’s war correspondent, was not one to be constrained.

Miller had made a habit of not taking no for an answer long before she accompanied American forces to document scenes such as the Blitz; nurses operating hospitals after D-Day; women serving across the armed forces; and just-liberated concentration camps. Her first coup was gracing the cover of U.S. Vogue in 1927 at age 19. (Her modeling career began thanks to a chance encounter with mega-publisher Condé Montrose Nast, who pulled her out of path of an approaching vehicle in New York City.) She then used her role as a model to transition into shooting her own editorials.

And as she grew less interested in posing for pictures than taking them, Miller brazenly determined that none other thanMan Raywould be her photography teacher. “He said he didn’t take students, and anyway, he was leaving Paris for his holiday,” she later recounted of approaching the Surrealist in 1929. “I said, ‘I know, I’m going with you’—and I did.”Amidst a series of cross-Atlantic moves and shifting relationships (Miller was famously a subject of the art and affections of eminent artists, includingPablo Picasso

), she remained steadfast in her photographic pursuits—from developing the printing technique of solarization alongside Ray (with whom she had an affair and creative partnership), to starting up her own studio in New York in the early 1930s, to her thoughtful solo explorations of Surrealism during her time in Cairo in the mid-1930s. When Miller settled in England with the painterRoland Penrose

in September 1939—the month the Nazis invaded Poland (and England declared war on Germany)—she volunteered as a studio assistant for British Vogue, which proved to be her first step toward war photography.

By 1943, Miller had signed on as the official war correspondent for British Vogue. The editors saw an opportunity to expand their coverage of the war effort, and Miller photographed an integral, less-celebrated aspect of the invasion: the women nurses in Normandy who saved soldiers’ lives in evacuation hospitals. Miller captured buzzing scenes on her Rolleiflex, which shot square-format photos and required close proximity to her subjects. The black-and-white images were published in 1944 under the heading “Unarmed Warriors” with text by Miller herself, who contributed written reporting in addition to her photographs. “In the shock ward they are limp and flat under brown blankets,” she wrote, “some with plasma flasks dripping drops of life into an outstretched splintered arm, another sufficiently recovered to smoke or chat to see if he’s real.”

“I think she made a deliberate decision to bury her career, and this was partly as a result of her war experiences, partly as a result of her post-traumatic stress,” said Penrose of his mother to NPR in 2011. The entirety of Miller’s oeuvre—60,000 negatives, 20,000 prints and contact sheets, and several documents and keepsakes—was discovered in the family home’s attic after her death in 1977 at age 70. Were it not for this chance finding, her key documentation of the women of World War II, and her contributions as a Surrealist—rather than simply one of their subjects—might’ve been forgotten. It seems a fitting conclusion to Miller’s life story, which, through to the end, was as surreal as her photographs.