Bert Stern: Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting

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Other starlets like Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor had the pleasure of gracing his lens as well. The question is, why Marilyn? Like Bailey's, Stern's 60s portraits feel direct and natural, and their effervescence is representative of the youthful explosion taking place across the creative industries in that decade. 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. Bert Stern was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 3, 1929. In a 1968 interview with Newsday, he said his father was a children’s portrait photographer. After dropping out of high school in his senior year, he served in the Army, working as a photographer on a base in Japan. That experience helped him land a job in the mailroom at Look magazine, where he became a protégé of Hershel Bramson, the art director, who would later give him his first job as a commercial photographer. The Smirnoff campaign was his first assignment. Vogue ultimately decided to run the article using all of the same selections they had originally planned to use, with the addition of text explaining to readers their position.

is aware of the fact that she had her drink spiked with 100% vodka, yet supplies more and more alcohol during the shootis at the time of his writing aware that for all intents and purposes, Marilyn committed suicide shortly after seeing the finished photos, of which she brutually vetoed more than half, and yet feels zero shame over the fact that even then he goes on to publish those photos (destructions marks and all) August 6, 1962: Vogue September issue was on press about to be printed when news broke of Monroe's death. The last time Marilyn would pose for a studio shoot in front of a camera. Six weeks later, the actress was found dead in her home. Even despite the ominous facts surrounding this sitting, the images it produced project a haunting, almost dreamlike quality unlike any photographs ever taken of the starlet. 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.

In 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot a series of photos of Marilyn Monroe that have collectively come to be known as “The Last Sitting.” Taken during several boozy sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air, the photographs are arguably the most famous images ever captured of America’s most famous actress: Monroe, sleepy-eyed and naked, sips from a Champagne glass, enacts a fan dance of sorts with various diaphanous scarves, romps with erotic playfulness on a bed of white linens. Six weeks after she had posed, Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose. Stern’s shoot with Marilyn later became controversial among fans for several reasons – first that he admits to plying her with alcohol to get her more willing to pose nude, and second that he published photos Marilyn had marked as not for publication. In spite of this, his photos have become iconic and are some of the most copied of Marilyn’s many sittings. The photos exude a sultry, almost love-at-first-sight feeling. They didn’t know each other at this point, yet I feel like the photos embody a familiarity Marilyn might have felt with Bert. And the intimacy doesn’t end there. The photo shoot is the culmination of a fantasy and a love affair. Bert Stern had idolized Marilyn Monroe since he met her at a party for the Actor’s Studio in 1955. He now finally had the opportunity to photograph Monroe and so great was his infatuation with the actress, that he referred to setting up his photo shoot as, “preparing for Marilyn’s arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs. Not to take her into my arms, but to turn her into tones…”Six years ago, Laumeister turned the tables — and her camera — on Stern and began to make a documentary of his life. Just a few days after India's Supreme Court recognized a "third gender" option, a transgender woman in India is vying for a seat in parliament. Since I was the art director of the magazine I figured I might as well shoot some of the pictures — [so] I became the Art Director and photographer.” In the summer of 1962 Bert Stern, who has died aged 83, took more than 2,500 photographs of Marilyn Monroe over three sessions held in a Los Angeles hotel. The images captured Monroe in a sometimes pensive but mostly playful mood as she posed nude, variously covered by bedsheets, a chinchilla coat, a stripy Vera Neumann scarf and a pair of chiffon roses. Despite their air of carefree humour, the portraits are inescapably wistful because – along with George Barris's subsequent pictures of Monroe at Santa Monica beach – they are among the last photographs taken of the star. She was found dead at her home several weeks later.

Signed in orange crayon on lower margin, recto. Estate of Bert Stern stamp, verso. From the Bert Stern Family Collection. His photographs of Monroe, taken over three days in June 1962 in the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, were collected in a mammoth 2000 book, “Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting.” “It was a one-time-in-a-lifetime experience, to have Marilyn Monroe in a hotel room,” Mr. Stern said in the 2010 documentary “Bert Stern: Original Madman,” “even though it was turned into a studio, where I could do anything I wanted.” Ms. Laumeister directed the film. Many of the photos showed Monroe unclothed, or posing behind transparent scarves. “She was so beautiful at that time,” Mr. Stern told Newsday. “I didn’t say, ‘Pose nude.’ It was more one thing leading to another: You take clothes off and off and off and off and off. She thought for a while. I’d say something and the pose just led to itself.” During the Korean war, Stern served in the US army as a cameraman and photographer. He established himself as a commercial photographer in his mid-20s. "I took audacious pictures that got people to want things," he wrote in The Last Sitting. He was proud of his 1955 photograph for a Smirnoff vodka campaign labelled "the driest of the dry". He took the quintessential pictures of Marilyn Monroe,” Laumeister says, “and that work can sometimes trump [everything else he’s done]. There are so many more photos, even of Marilyn, and the show is representative of his wider work and ideas.”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. As Stern writes in The Last Sitting: “There were two Bert Sterns. One was the Bert Stern who had been accused of playing it close to the edge… Who had married his first wife with his fingers crossed…who thought his second, real marriage was over six months after it began…who had an appointment with blond destiny. That Bert Stern would gamble everything he had for a night with Marilyn Monroe. The other was Bert Stern, husband father, provider photographer who was going to get the picture, get out of there, go home to his wife and baby, and live happily ever after.” In the early 1960s, Bert Stern was one of the most successful, creative and highly paid photographers of the day. His meteoric rise had seen him produce some of the most original and remarkable images at the inception of advertising’s Golden Age, a seminal documentary film, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, and iconic portraits of some of the world’s most famous stars — including the celebrated “Last Sitting” photographs of Marilyn Monroe.

For Stern, taking photographs was like making love — an intense, emotional experience. “I fell in love with everybody I photographed,” he says today. 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. repeatedly gets off on describing her as "childlike" and "vulnerable", so far as comparing it to spying on his 12 year old girl next door as a teenager Vogue published The Last Sitting series one day after Monroe’s death, giving the public an intimate portrait of the star in the wake of tragedy. Though the magazine usually includes a list of designers in its shoots, editors chose to eschew its focus on the clothing and eliminated fashion credits, instead featuring only the photos as homage to the star. The shoot captured the nation’s imagination and has since inspired countless spreads, including a 2008 cover shoot featuring Lindsay Lohan in New York Magazine, photographed by Stern himself. 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.

Stern’s trajectory was interrupted by the Korean War. In 1951 he was drafted into the U.S. Army. But Stern never made it to Korea: instead, at the recommendation of an old friend who was already stationed in Tokyo, Stern was diverted to Japan and assigned to the photo department. He learned to use a film camera and made motion pictures of news events for the army while taking stills for himself. The Last Sitting is a book and photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe by photographer Bert Stern. The photo shoot was commissioned by Vogue magazine in late June 1962, taking place over three daily sessions, just six weeks before she died. The legendary photographs of Marilyn Monroe from Bert Stern’s “The Last Sitting” are the subject of this exhibition at Staley-Wise Gallery. Stern’s career continued strong for many decades after Marilyn’s passing, but he remains best known for The Last Sitting, and described Marilyn has his favorite of all the people he photographed in an interview shortly before his death. This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. As aunique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, the Last Sitting®it is the world's finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe.