A retrospective exhibition devoted to Lee Miller has opened under a title drawn from the photographer's own words: "I didn't waste a minute of all my life." The declaration, defiant and unsentimental, sets the frame for a show that traces the full arc of one of the 20th century's most mercurial careers behind a camera.

The exhibition title does the curatorial argument's work in a single sentence. Miller's life resisted tidy narrative: she moved between modelling, the Parisian avant-garde, war reportage and later culinary and photographic experimentation with a speed that left little room for idleness. A retrospective format suits her better than most, because it allows the contradictions to sit side by side rather than be smoothed into a single professional identity.

Miller's own aphorism also functions as a quiet rebuke to the ways her story has been told. Biographical accounts have often organised her life around the men she worked with and knew — Man Ray, Roland Penrose, David E. Scherman — while the photographs themselves testify to an eye that belonged to no one else. A show hung around her own words reclaims the axis of the account.

What such an exhibition must ultimately deliver is the work: the fashion images made with surrealist wit, the studio experiments, the war photographs that rank among the most consequential journalism of their decade. Miller's strength as a photographer lay in her refusal to treat any subject with the expected gravity or the expected lightness — her surrealist instincts survived even the ruins of Europe, and that tension is the engine of her best pictures.

The retrospective arrives at a moment when institutions are reassessing photographers whose reputations were shaped by mid-century critical habits — habits that often filed women photographers under muse, model or accessory. Placing Miller's complete output on the wall, sequenced by the sweep of a single life, is the most direct answer to that inherited framing.

The exhibition's title suggests a photographer in a hurry. Whether the show sustains that velocity across the full span of the career — or reveals the moments when the minute-taking grew difficult — is the question any visitor to the retrospective will bring through the door.