8 PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO CAPTURED MARILYN MONROE’S BEAUTY AND VULNERABILITY

Jacqui Palumbo

Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, bore a heavy weight as the archetypal sex symbol of the 1950s and ’60s. Her highs and lows have all become legend: her high-profile marriages and splits from baseballer Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller; her secret affair and birthday-cake serenade with then-president John F. Kennedy; and her final, turbulent years before her early death from barbiturate overdose at age 36. Less discussed has been her bold decision to disrupt the film industry by co-founding her own production company, as well as her attempts to command agency over her own image.

Countless renowned photographers sought to capture the “real” Monroe, and she knew the power that the camera held. Today, we’re more aware that our favorite celebrities maintain a carefully crafted public image, but Monroe’s enigma still fascinates us. “There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe,” Richard Avedon once said of her. “[She was] invented, like an author creates a character.”

Here are eight famous photographers who captured the late, great comedic actress.

Celebrities didn’t often sit for Philippe Halsman; instead, they jumped. Following each shoot with the photographer, he would ask them to take a leap of faith in front of the camera, believing that moment of suspension to be their most open and true. Monroe acquiesced, as all celebrities, artists, and royals did under Halsman’s lens, and she jumped high, legs tucked and grinning.

Halsman became acquainted with Monroe when he had photographed her for a Life cover story in 1952. The shoot took place in her modest apartment in Hollywood when she was breaking into the industry.

 Monroe posed in a slinky off-the-shoulder dress for the cover shot, but she also performed a series of exercises in a bikini top and slacks. The series, though still glamorous, feels a little more earnest than many of her editorials; Monroe isn’t an untouchable sex symbol, but a woman at ease in her own living space, daydreaming on the floor or laughing mid-handstand.

Garry Winogrand’s oeuvre has been defined by his quote that “all things are photographable.” In capturing all the minutiae of New York City’s streets for three decades, he chronicled a much larger snapshot of a changing America. He also crystallized iconic moments, and one of his rolls of film included the most recreated New York moments of all time: Monroe holding her white dress down, her head thrown back in laughter, as the wind from a subway grate blows her skirt up.

Though there were other photographers on the set of The Seven Year Itch (1955) who witnessed the scene, Winogrand’s image of a laughing Monroe has endured. The street photographer faced Monroe head-on. His frame did not show the calculated flirtatiousness she employed on set and in life, but open joy.

When Monroe sat for Richard Avedon in 1957, it was a meeting of two creative powerhouses who would each become iconic in their respective fields. Avedon was working as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and Monroe had just successfully out-maneuvered 20th Century Fox in a contract victory that gave her more direction over her projects.

The portrait from their session together become one of her highest-valued images because of the emotional truth it seemed to reveal. “For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe,” Avedon once recalled of the shoot. “And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.”

Monroe is glamorous in her signature curled hair, lined eyelids, and a glittering dress, but her gaze reveals sorrow just beneath the surface. The Telegraph called it “the most honest picture ever taken” of her. The photo sold for £77,500 at Sotheby’s in 2016, blowing past its high estimation of £50,000…………..

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