Whichever side of the lens Lee Miller stood on, she had presence. Vogue captured that: the New York-born teen became a model for the magazine in the 1920s, posing in Patou and Chanel, but she wasn’t content only being a subject. Her ambition was to capture the grit and beauty of the world she saw around her; eventually stepping behind the lens to become one of the most daring and subversive photographers of the 20th century: a Surrealist, a war correspondent, and an unflinching documentarian of trauma.

Traveling to Paris, she collaborated with the Surrealist artist Man Ray (and began a brief, creatively fulfilling affair). She helped popularise the solarisation technique, and developed a fascination with the French avant-garde. “This was 1929 in the spring, early summer, and I was in Venice and I had just been all over Italy looking at paintings,” Miller said in 1975. “That was when I had that revulsion against classical art and all that sort of thing… So I got on a train and went to Paris and knocked on Man Ray’s door… I never looked back!”

But it was during World War II that Miller’s work took its most extraordinary forms. As a photojournalist, she documented the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and - most harrowingly - the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Her photo of herself in Hitler’s bathtub, boots caked with mud from the camps, is among the most striking images of the 20th century, where a banal domestic space becomes suffused with the horror of Nazism.

After the war, she largely withdrew from photography, suffering from PTSD long before the term existed. It wasn't until after her death in 1977 that her vast archive of photographs and writings was rediscovered by her son, igniting a wave of reappraisal. Today, she is remembered as a chronicler of beauty and brutality; a woman who looked boldly at harsh truths through her lens.