The American photographer Lee Miller (1907-77) is immortalised through images mailed from the battlefields of Europe to her London editor at American Vogue during the Second World War.

The only official female photo-journalist operating on the frontline, she was a fearless communicator and accompanied her photographs with descriptive articles.

The blown-up Vogue spreads included in this exhibition vividly transmit those experiences, but war photography is a small section of this intelligently edited four-decade oeuvre.

The curator, Mark Haworth-Booth (author of the accompanying book), offers a chronological flow of changing styles, opening - perhaps surprisingly - with the tall, striking blonde wafting through the 1927 Jean Cocteau film The Blood of the Poet.

By then, she was a Vogue cover model and being drawn into Paris's Surrealist set. Her New York self-portraits are classics, dreamy and elegant, and epitomised by the perfectly composed Self Portrait in Headband, 1932.

We see how her apprenticeship to the pioneering Man Ray transforms her work and stimulates experimentation in still-lifes (pebbles, nudes and plants), buildings as modernist abstracts, faces gilded by his solarisation techniques. She outflanks the Surrealists by serving a shocking dish of severed breasts from mastectomies on dinner plates.

Miller's entry into the War sparked new ideas, and includes a light-hearted 1941 portrait of two young English women wearing fire masks, styled like a fashion shoot. On the frontline, the drama and fear surrounding a massive explosion at St Malo are palpable - but juxtaposed with a woman modelling a coat in Paris.

Miller's documentation of the liberated concentration camps is excluded, but a suicided German girl on a sofa, and the ironically playful sight, in Hitler's Munich apartment, of Miller in his bath are included.

Peace time shrank Miller's existence to family life in the Sussex countryside, with her husband Roland Penrose and son Anthony (eye to eye with Picasso is a memorable portrait), but a late contribution to photography's history is unexpectedly witty: Working Guests involved celebrated artist friends doing forced domestic labour and includes Max Ernst pulling weeds.

This exhibition offers an original, satisfying shape to a life which the artist said resembled "a water-soaked jigsaw".

The closing image, Picasso's vibrant painting of Miller as a Cubist collage of colours and shapes, perfectly symbolises that creatively fragmented life.

• Until 6 January. Information: 020 7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk.