Bert Stern: Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting

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Beginning today, visitors to the Paris exhibition hall (and car dealer) DS World can experience the elegance and vulnerability of Stern’s series in the exhibition “ Marilyn, the Last Sitting,” on view until January 6, 2018. The photos are featured alongside DS car models, including a rare, bright-red DS 21 Cabriolet from 1966.

Around the same time as the Cleopatra shoot Stern received a call from Glamour with an offer to shoot for them. “I really had my heart set on working for Vogue,” he says, but made a deal with the art director. “If I shot for Glamour I could shoot for Vogue.”

Bert Stern was born on October 3 in Brooklyn, NY. He was a whopping age of 33 when he got this break-of-a-lifetime. Stern’s sensuous and intimate portraits, brought the American public closer to the star and established Monroe’s position in American culture as the fabled figure of femininity, fame, mystery, and tragedy. These, to me, are the most stunning, because it is clear Marilyn is at her most comfortable and uninhibited. What about the photos of Marilyn with the orange X over her face? What is that about? It's a good thing that Stern did not become the date-rape Picassoesque Minotaur he had imagined himself to be. Instead he remained a great photographer. "There are no photographs of Cleopatra," he wrote (forgetting perhaps his photos of Liz Taylor). "No prints of what Paris saw and felt when he gazed at Helen of Troy. They're like dead stars; the light from them no longer reaches us. But there are photographs of Marilyn Monroe." Marilyn had become a Hollywood sex symbol by this time, known for playing the “blonde bombshell." She was the object of every man's desire.

Stern excavated and preserved the poignant humanity of the real woman—beautiful, but also fragile, needy, flawed—from the monumental sex symbol. In our armored, airbrushed age, his achievement feels almost revolutionary. is aware of the fact that she had her drink spiked with 100% vodka, yet supplies more and more alcohol during the shoot Stern, it seemed, could do no wrong. “I was having a great time. Life was all work, work was all life.” But by the late Sixties, things began to unravel.

Bert Stern was the last person to photograph Marilyn Monroe before she died, 39 years ago this month. An exclusive interview with Salon.

Walking on 5th avenue with a Martini glass filled with water, for inspiration, Stern noticed the Plaza hotel was inverted in the glass that acted like a lens and turned the image upside down. “I came up with the idea to photograph the Pyramid of Giza upside down in the glass — but I would have to go to Egypt to do it.”

Perhaps synchronicity is also at play with the images; in this candid and sensuous portrayal of the actress, the viewer gets to cherish her work one final time before Monroe’s untimely demise. Bert Stern‘s pictures of Marilyn Monroe, now known as “The Last Sitting”, are some of the most memorable images depicting the actress.

Based in New York, Stern continued to shoot the most famous models, musicians and actors throughout the 80s and 90s, including Madonna and Kate Moss. He repeatedly returned to the Last Sitting photographs, which have been reprinted in many books including a Taschen publication that pairs Stern's photos with Norman Mailer's controversial 1973 biography of Monroe. The year all of Bert’s dreams came true. He proposed shooting Marilyn for Vogue, and Vogue said yes. Even when people come to see me talk, they have certain set notions," Kannamma told AFP. "It is only when they hear what I have to say and see me in person that they can get past the fact that I am a transgender." Side note: Did you know we named our Marilyn accordion-pleated skirt after Marilyn to pay homage to her infamous accordion-pleated dress that she wore in The Seven Year Itch? So, who is Bert Stern and what is The Last Sitting? Lauded professionally, and in his private life married to a beautiful dancer, Allegra Kent, with whom he had three children, Bert Stern seemingly had it all.

The story of Marilyn Monroe's last sitting needs a coda. After looking through the hundreds of photos, you realize how silent the images are. Did Monroe talk with Stern while he shot his Nikon? "Sure," he says. But then he can't remember what she said. Did they make small talk about Hollywood? "No." Talk about the weather? "No." We all know that many others besides Marilyn Monroe died or crashed to make the 1960s be the 1960s. Bert Stern, himself, just barely made it through that decade alive. He'd go on to become the 1960s fashion photographer of New York. His style of camera-as-phallus inspired the first photographer-standing-over-the-model scene in "Blow Up." Stern was responsible for Twiggy's brief reign as fashion's pop starvation princess. After Andy Warhol had lunch with Stern for the first time, the former returned to his office and was gunned down. Stern had a little record player spinning the Everly Brothers. "Don't you have any Frank Sinatra?" Monroe pouted.Then what? "I was trying to get one picture of her looking sexy," Stern recalls. "I had to get up high. We had to get her P.R. agent to taunt her a bit about her boyfriends to get her laughing. One was JFK and the other was some guy in Mexico. A Mexican person. I don't know his name. That was the only prompting that went on." Stern grew up in Brooklyn. At the age of 16 he started work in the mail room at Look magazine. “I loved that job,” he says — but he was destined for bigger things. Bert Stern, the famous commercial and fashion photographer of the 60s, was the last to be granted a sitting by Marilyn Monroe six weeks before her tragic death. The three-day session yielded nearly 2,600 pictures-fashion, portrait, and nude studies-of indescribable sensual and human vibrancy, of which no more than 20 were published. And yet these few photographs ineradicably shaped our image of Marilyn Monroe.