Monthly Talk – Lee Miller: 20th Century Woman

by Derek Adams. ‘Lee Miller: 20th Century Woman’ focuses on the extraordinary life of the American-born photographer Lee Miller, who was also a New York model, Parisian artist’s muse, surrealist and Vogue fashion photographer, WW2 war correspondent and gourmet cook. Lee lived in New York, Paris, and Cairo before moving to England in 1939, living in London and Sussex until she died in 1977.

Lee Miller has been the subject of a 2024 movie ‘Lee’ starring Kate Winslet, as well as major exhibitions at the V&A, the Imperial War Museum, and forthcoming at Tate Britain (Oct 2025 to Feb 2026).

A professional photographer himself, Derek Adams has spent years meticulously researching the life story of Lee Miller. In 2019 he published ‘Exposure: Snapshots from the life of Lee Miller’ a biography in a series of poems, of which Lee’s son Antony Penrose said “I regard this book as a perceptive and touching portrait of my mother.”