Imagine Cindy Crawford.

Not difficult, I know, but stay focused. Imagine Cindy Crawford. Then imagine if Cindy decided in the years after she stopped shaving KD Lang on the cover of Vanity Fair, popping up in George Michael videos or appearing in photographs looking hotter than a fat man in Mexico City at the height of summer who's just won a chilli-eating contest, to become a photographer.

Not a big stretch. Models become photographers all the time (hi Helena). But imagine Cindy decided she was going to take her photographs in the middle of the Iraq war.

No. Can't see that? OK, rewind 70 years and remember Lee Miller, Vogue model and war photographer.

Miller's is one of the great stories of 20th-century photography. Legend has it she was discovered when she walked in front of Conde Nast himself.

She moved to France, became Man Ray's lover, is said to have discovered the solarisation process that Man Ray is famous for, started taking pictures, became a war photographer, witnessed the liberation of Paris after the Second World War, visited Buchenwald and Dachau and was photographed having a wash in Hitler's bath.

She was a long-term friend of Picasso and Max Ernst, and after the war would entertain them in the home she shared in Sussex with her artist husband Roland Penrose. She also suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and turned to drink. In short she did a bit more with her time than Kim Kardashian has managed so far (though there's still time, Kim).

It would have been Miller's birthday on Tuesday. To celebrate the Lee Miller archive went digital. Some 3000 images are now online. If we're lucky it will bring her sharply into focus.