In 1927, a chance encounter on a New York sidewalk with the media mogul Condé Nast made the gamine beauty Lee Miller a magazine cover girl and modeling sensation. Later, as the lover and muse of the artist Man Ray, her face and body were preserved in some of the most striking solarized portraits of the Surrealist age.

But Miller’s place in history was ultimately secured by her work on the other side of the lens, first as a fashion photographer and later with her documentation of life in Europe during World War II.

Appointed Vogue’s official war photographer in London, Miller, who died in 1977 at the age of 70, captured scenes from the Blitz and intimate snapshots of life on the British home front. Later, as one of a handful of female front-line photographers, she accompanied American forces to document the D-Day aftermath, Allied advance and eventual liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Her candid and devastating photographs of victims and perpetrators of Nazi oppression were widely circulated, while a haunting shot of Miller, naked and filthy, snapped by a Life magazine photographer as she symbolically washed away the horror she had witnessed from the bathtub of Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment became a seminal liberation image.

Those pictures, and many more, have been included in “Lee Miller: A Woman’s War,” a current exhibition of her life and work at the Imperial War Museum in London, and an accompanying book with the same name, by Hilary Roberts. As their shared title would suggest, the two retrospectives focus specifically on her vision of gender during the war, her exploration of the role women played throughout the period and the impact it had on their position in society.

“In many respects, Miller’s life before the Second World War had been defined by her femininity,” said Ms. Roberts, who is also curator of the exhibit. “She may have belonged to the first generation of women entitled to vote but was well aware she lived in a man’s world. Photography offered Miller an outlet for her personal frustration and a means of taking control.”

Most of Miller’s subjects throughout her body of work displayed are women, and many of the 150 photographs featured have not been published before. Her prewar catalog experiments with complex lighting systems creating artful and abstract shadows, while sculptural nudes with separated limbs and portraits of women and their lovers are clearly dissections of female subjugation.

From 1940, Miller regularly produced glamorous shoots for British Vogue tinged with her early Surrealist leanings. As the war progressed, the magazine then became a critical strategic conduit for government ministries on persuading women how they could and should behave during times of conflict.

“It seems pretty silly to go on working for a frivolous paper like Vogue,” she said, then added, “It may be good for the country’s morale, but it’s hell on mine.” But over time, her work moved from the studios, where she had documented how to dress stylishly amid rationing and how shorter hair could be chic as more and more women began working in factories, to raw photographic essays on life on the home front.

From nurses in uniform caring for the wounded, to female searchlight crews of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British army, in their big bear coats and female fighter pilots seated stoically in their cockpits, Miller reinforced that in her sympathetic view, plucky, feisty and levelheaded women were the backbone of the war effort at home.

In Europe, where subjects included shaven-headed Frenchwomen accused of collaborating with the Germans, cold-eyed nuns, homeless street urchins and women in ordinary domestic scenes amid the urban rubble, her work becomes more nuanced.

“Germany is a beautiful landscape dotted with jewel-like villages, blotched with ruined cities and inhabited by schizophrenics,” Miller wrote in a dispatch for Vogue from the liberation front lines in 1945, taking the magazine into new editorial territory. “Mothers sew and sweep and bale, and farmers plough and harrow; all just like real people. But they aren’t. They are the enemy.”

Both the book and exhibition stress the emotional and psychological toll Miller’s experiences took on her. As Antony Penrose, her son from her marriage to Sir Roland Penrose, the British Surrealist artist, writes in the book’s introduction, “There is no erase button for the traumatic images that enter our minds.”

Mr. Penrose also suggests that his mother, the victim of a childhood rape that infected her with gonorrhea and who later became a chronic alcoholic and depressive, battled with her many unexpressed traumas and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in the postwar years.

After a few botched assignments in which she struggled to meet deadlines, her photographic career ended along with much of her reputation. At the time Miller died, her work was near forgotten; all of the images featured in the exhibition are from the 60,000 negatives Mr. Penrose found in the attic after her death. Few publications noted her death with an obituary (The New York Times did not). He has since worked aggressively to restore her critical reputation, and his biography of his mother, “The Lives of Lee Miller,” now looks set to be made into a movie (perhaps with Kate Winslet in the lead role).

“Although I hardly knew her while she was alive,” he said, “I have become aware of much of her life and personality through the legacy of these images.”