This autumn, CAMERA – the Italian Center for Photography in Turin – will honor one of the most extraordinary figures of 20th-century global culture: American photographer Lee Miller. The new exhibition, curated by CAMERA’s artistic director Walter Guadagnini, will be on display from October 1, 2025, to February 1, 2026. It will showcase over 160 images from the Lee Miller Archives, many of which are nearly unpublished, offering both a public and intimate perspective on her work and her extraordinary personality. The exhibition will also kick off the celebrations for CAMERA’s 10th anniversary, with a broad and multifaceted program dedicated to the world of photography in all its dimensions.
The exhibition focuses on Miller’s intense activity between the 1930s and 1950s, a period that saw her become a crucial bridge between the United States, her homeland, and Europe, where she moved as a young woman, first settling in Paris and later in England, as well as Africa, where she spent several years of her dynamic life. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, Miller moved to Paris in the late 1920s determined to become a photographer, eventually convincing Man Ray to take her on as his assistant.
This marked the true beginning of her career, which was filled with extraordinary encounters and choices. She immersed herself in the surrealist world, becoming a friend and muse to artists like Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Paul Éluard, while forging strong bonds with figures such as Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning. She produced some of the most iconic images in the history of surrealist photography and contributed to the discovery of solarization, a technique she and Man Ray would masterfully exploit. In the mid-1930s, she married and moved to Egypt for several years, creating enigmatic landscape photographs before returning to Europe on the eve of World War II.
As a contributor to Vogue, she produced not only classic haute couture shoots but also, with the outbreak of the war, unexpected images capturing the blend of style and daily life in bomb-ravaged London.
At the end of the war, Miller captured her most famous work: harrowing images of concentration camps and the collapse of Nazi Germany, documenting scenes of suicide among officers, the burning of Hitler’s summer residence, and devastated cities. These series, published in Vogue, left a lasting mark on Miller, who retired from photography after the war, settling in the Sussex countryside with her new husband Roland Penrose. There, she welcomed her circle of artist friends, and while she stepped away from professional photography, even her private family images retained the subversive and ironic genius of one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.
The exhibition will narrate Lee Miller’s artistic, professional, and personal journey, accompanied by a catalog published by Dario Cimorelli Editore and a program of educational and participatory initiatives designed for audiences of all ages and backgrounds.
