Final photographer of Marilyn Monroe
NEW YORK - Bert Stern, a commercial photographer best known for his images of Marilyn Monroe in what became known as “The Last Sitting,” has died in New York City. He was 83.
Stern died Wednesday at his Manhattan home, said Shannah Laumeister, 43, a filmmaker who said the two were secretly married in 2009. She said the reason for keeping it secret was private.
Stern shot thousands of pictures of Monroe at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles in 1962 for Vogue magazine just weeks before her drug-overdose death. They included nude and seminude images.
The 2,500 images, including ones Monroe rejected, werepublished in a 1982 book titled The Last Sitting, and a second book, Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting, that came out in 2000.
In Bert Stern: Original Madman, a documentary Laumeister made of the photographer, Stern said, “It was a one-timein-a-lifetime experience to have Marilyn Monroe in a hotel room, even though it was turned into a studio.”
He photographed many other celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Truman Capote.
He also was a big advertising photographer, beginning his career with an ad campaign for Smirnoff Vodka that featured a V-shaped glass of vodka set in the front of an Egyptian pyramid.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 10 on 06/28/2013