From fashion icon to war photographer: The Polygon Gallery displays photographer Lee Miller’s work in new exhibit

Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945) is on display at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver until Feb. 1. 

The exhibition highlights American photographer Lee Miller’s work and reveals how she balanced fashion, wartime documentation, and artistic experimentation, carving her own career path and capturing striking images that reflect resilience, creativity, and the complexity of the Second World War.

The exhibit also focuses on Miller’s professional output — tracing her evolution from studio and fashion photography to her role as an accredited war correspondent for British Vogue. 

For Elliott Ramsey, curator at The Polygon, the decision to bring the exhibition to Vancouver came down to timing and relevance. 

“It wouldn’t have occurred to us to organize a Lee Miller exhibition, because there had been one, even if it had been 25 years ago,” he says. 

Originally curated by Gaëlle Morel in collaboration with the Lee Miller Archives, the exhibition premiered at a major photography festival in France before traveling to Toronto, where Ramsey encountered it there for the first time.

“I wasn’t around to see the exhibition 25 years ago,” he says. “To see that work, and to have that response to it, I introduced the show or told people about it back in Vancouver.”

A defining feature of the exhibition is its focus on Miller as a professional. 

“What Gaëlle really did was focus on the photography that Lee Miller did as an in-demand, paid professional,” Ramsey says. “[It’s] not bringing in the modelling photographs that were taken of her or the surrealist experiments or all of that other stuff.”

“​​We’re actually showing a lot of photographs of Lee Miller’s that a lot of exhibitions about her work leave out because they’re ‘commercial.’”

The exhibition opens with Miller’s 1930s studio photography, created during her early years as a working photographer. These images reflect technical precision and experimentation.

“We went with this very light, sort of pinkish colour for the first room, just so that it felt kind of airy, bright like a photo studio would feel, and maybe a little bit friendlier,” Ramsey says. 

The second section moves into Miller’s fashion photography for British Vogue during the early 1940s. These works are often overlooked in institutional settings. 

Working under wartime conditions forced Miller to adapt constantly. 

“She’s dealing with fabric shortages, paper shortages after Britain entered the Second World War. She can’t get colour slides shipped across the Atlantic,” Ramsey says. “So she has to be inventive in every sense of the word.”

The final section presents Miller’s war photography, including images taken during the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. 

“I wept when I was installing the exhibition because they are such intense images.”

To guide visitors through this material, The Polygon adjusted the exhibition’s layout. 

“We use this sheer curtain instead of a hard wall to divide the two sections in order to kind of give a sense of that simultaneity,” Ramsey says. 

The design reflects how Miller’s British Vogue work and war photography unfolded simultaneously.

Ramsey believes Miller’s story continues to resonate today, particularly for women in creative industries. He also hopes visitors leave questioning established art histories. 

“Some of the pioneering photographic techniques that Lee Miller discovered, like solargraphy for example … was attributed to Man Ray,” he says. “Lee Miller discovered it, but the man that she was working alongside took credit for it. So let’s rejig our thinking around the canon of the 20th century.”