[5][6] Soon after, Miller left home at 19 to enroll in the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan to study life drawing and painting.

[3] This incident helped launch her modeling career; she appeared in a blue hat and pearls in a drawing by George Lepape on the cover of Vogue on March 15, 1927.

One of Miller's accounts involved a mouse running over her foot, causing her to switch on the light in the darkroom in mid-development of the photograph.

[21] Solarisation fits the surrealist principle of the unconscious accident being integral to art and evokes the style's appeal to the irrational or paradoxical in combining opposites of positive and negative.

[22] Among Miller's friends were Duchess Solange d'Ayen–the fashion editor of French Vogue,[23] Pablo Picasso and fellow surrealists Paul Éluard and Jean Cocteau.

Cocteau was so mesmerized by Miller's beauty that he transformed her into a plaster cast of a classical statue for his film, The Blood of a Poet (1930).

[26] She established a portrait and commercial photography studio (with $10,000 worth of backing from Christian R. Holmes II and Cliff Smith) with her brother Erik (who had worked for the fashion photographer Toni von Horn) as her darkroom assistant.

[27] Clients of the Lee Miller Studio included BBDO, Henry Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Saks Fifth Avenue, I. Magnin and Co., and Jay Thorpe.

[28] In response to the exhibition, Katherine Grant Sterne wrote a review in Parnassus in March 1932, noting that Miller "has retained more of her American character in the Paris milieu.

[29] Among her portrait clients were the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934).

She returned to Paris and went to a party the day she arrived, where she reconciled with Man Ray, and met the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose.

[33] At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living at Downshire Hill in Hampstead, London with Penrose when Germany's aerial bombardment of the city began.

Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the U.S., Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue, documenting what became known as the Blitz.

Miller's military accreditation as a female war correspondent did not allow her to enter an active combat zone, but rather than leave she decided to stay, and spent five days on the front lines photographing as much of the Battle of Saint-Malo as she could.

She spent time composing her photographs, famously framing some from inside the cattle trains that had transported thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps.

[38] Miller teamed up with American photojournalist David E. Scherman, a Life magazine correspondent, on many assignments, including the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

[44] During this period, Miller photographed dying children in a Vienna hospital, peasant life in post-war Hungary, corpses of Nazi officers and their families, and finally, the execution of former Hungarian Prime Minister László Bárdossy.

[3] At the war's end, Miller's work as a wartime photojournalist continued as she sent telegrams back to the British Vogue editor, Audrey Withers, urging her to publish photographs from the camps.

After returning to Britain from central Europe, Miller suffered severe episodes of clinical depression which her son believes was due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

According to her housekeeper Patsy, she specialized in "historical food" like roast suckling pig as well as treats such as marshmallows in a cola sauce (especially made to annoy English critic Cyril Connolly who told her Americans didn't know how to cook).

He discovered sixty thousand or so photographs, negatives, documents, journals, cameras, love letters, and souvenirs in cardboard boxes and trunks in Farley Farm's attic after his mother's death.

Since then, a number of books, mostly accompanying exhibitions of her photographs, have been written by art historians and writers such as Jane Livingstone, Richard Calvocoressi, and Haworth-Booth.

Penrose and David Scherman collaborated on the book Lee Miller's War: Photographer and Correspondent With the Allies in Europe 1944–45, in 1992.

Interviews with Penrose form the core of the 1995 documentary Lee Miller: Through the Mirror, made with Scherman and writer-director Sylvain Roumette.

[61] Most of the movie shows Miller during World War II, depicting the occasions for some of her most well known pictures from the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, and including a glimpse into the relationships with main characters in her life, such as her colleague photojournalist David Scherman, British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, and her husband Roland Penrose.