Tate Britain has mounted a retrospective of Lee Miller — the American photographer, surrealist and war correspondent whose career spanned fashion, fine art and some of the 20th century's darkest reportage — and the honest verdict is that it has taken far too long.

That delay is itself the story. Miller, born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907, began as a model in New York before stepping behind the camera, and for decades institutions treated her principally as a muse — the woman who appeared in Vogue, who inspired Man Ray in Paris, who cooked for Picasso. The retrospective pushes back on that reduction. It positions her as the author of the images, not their subject.

The Paris years established the surrealists' visual grammar as her own. Miller arrived in France in 1929, talked her way into Man Ray's studio, and within three years was making solarised portraits and close-cropped studies that stand shoulder to shoulder with the movement's better-known names. When she returned the technique to her own ends — hard light, unexpected cropping, the human body rendered as landscape — she was no disciple. She was a practitioner with her own signature.

Her fashion work for British Vogue, and later for the magazine's American edition, carried that sensibility into print. A Miller fashion photograph rarely simply sells a dress; it dislocates the scene, plays scale against the figure, lets a shadow do half the modelling. The Surrealist eye never switched off.

Then came the war. Miller crossed from fashion into accredited combat reportage for Vogue, photographing the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and — most unforgettably — the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau in 1945. Her image of herself bathing in Hitler's Munich apartment, taken on the day the city fell, remains one of the most disquieting self-portraits in the medium's history: casual, contaminated, deliberately profane. Any serious account of war photography that omits her is incomplete.

After 1945, Miller turned to food — writing and photographing cookery for Vogue and entertaining a postwar artistic circle at Farley Farm in Sussex. The arc from Dachau to gourmet journalism has often been narrated as collapse or trauma, a framing that risks shrinking her again. A retrospective lets the work complicate that story on its own terms.

The craft holds the room. Her prints are direct, unshowy, decisive. She worked fast under conditions — bombed streets, liberated camps, magazine deadlines — that left no margin for mannerism, and the economy of means became the style. Curators assembling the full range can now show how the Surrealist's croppings and the correspondent's bluntness were the same intelligence at work.

For Tate Britain, the exhibition is also an institutional correction. Miller lived her final decades in England and died at Farley Farm in 1977; a British museum giving her a full-scale retrospective acknowledges what the photographs themselves have argued for years. Whether the show settles the question of her rank among the century's photographers — or simply opens it to a wider public — will depend on the hang, the sequencing, and the restraint of the wall texts. On the evidence of her oeuvre, the images need no advocacy. They only needed the walls.