Lee Miller was discovered in circumstances that can only be described as fairy tale.

A day-dreaming Lee, aged 19, stepping out on to a busy junction, was almost run over but pulled from danger by the hands of none other than Cond Nast.

Struck by her exquisite looks, Nast immediately convinced her to become a model and soon she was cover girl of Vogue - one of the magazines under his ownership.

With her close-cropped blonde hair and doe-eyed, androgynous beauty, Lee became the favourite model of many of the great photographers of the day.

She was the first real person to appear in a menstrual hygiene ad - for Kotex in 1928.

In each advert Lee stands dressed in a satin gown, demurely looking away from the camera. One carries the words "It has women's enthusiastic approval" - which is ironic as the photographs of Lee were bought by Kotex and used against her wishes.

Once she realised she had broken a cultural taboo, Lee was proud to be associated with the ad.

But she quickly grew bored and was much more interested in being on the other side of the lens so she packed her bags and moved to Paris.

One day she walked up to Man Ray, the already famous surrealist photographer, and introduced herself as his new student. When Man Ray told her he didn't have apprentices, she replied, "Well, you do now". Soon she was the artist's protge - and his lover.

Lee worked hard and became established as a photographer in her own right.

One day she accidentally turned on the light while he was working in his darkroom and the process of solarisation was discovered. This technique, in which both the positive and negative areas of the photograph are exposed to light during development, creates a silvered fogging of the image - a haunting quality well suited to surrealism.

Lee and Man Ray were seen everywhere, friends of everyone who was anyone. Like most artists of the era, the surrealists spent much of their time in cafs and bars around Paris, debating the important issues of the day and, of course, the importance of sexual freedom.

Man Ray was horrified to find Lee was already an advocate of free love. Even in this avant-garde movement, sexual freedom was the grail to be sought by males while women were given the role of muses and wives.

In reality the surrealists were believers of the equation: Promiscuous man = sexually liberated hero. Promiscuous woman = slut.

But Lee carried on regardless, taking as many sexual partners as she pleased.

A while later, bored of Paris, she left a devastated Man Ray and returned to New York.

She met and married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian millionaire. They moved to Cairo and for a while Lee put her camera aside, concentrating instead on being a socialite wife.

The marriage didn't work out but Lee and Aziz remained close friends. Back in Paris she met Roland Penrose, the artist who would eventually become her second husband.

During the early war years she worked as a fashion photographer in London but then began taking photos of the Blitz for Vogue. In 1941 she joined David Scherman, a photographer for Life Magazine. Lee was the only female combat journalist to cover the war in Europe and one of the first photographers to enter the concentration camps on their liberation by the Allies.

After the war Lee returned to England and to Penrose. But, like many combat journalists, she was a war junkie.

She returned to Paris but eventually realised she couldn't go on and returned to London. Shortly afterwards Lee became pregnant. Aziz divorced her and she married Penrose. After the birth of their son, Anthony, the pair settled into married life.

Together they founded the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) in London, while their home in the Sussex Downs became a meeting place for artists and friends. Picasso, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Max Ernst and others spent time there.

Lee died of cancer in 1977 at Chiddingly. After her death, her son was shocked to find the attic was filled with boxes of prints and negatives.

Since then her work has finally been catalogued and she has been given the place in the canon of photography her work merits.