Portraits of a Legend in the Making of Marilyn Monroe

Few figures in 20th-century culture have been photographed as prolifically and as iconically as Marilyn Monroe. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, she rose from an unstable childhood marked by foster homes and orphanages to become a global icon of beauty, sensuality, and vulnerability. Yet beyond the silver screen, it was through the still image that Monroe's persona was both cemented and dissected. Photographers played a crucial role in shaping the complex mythology around her, creating images that were by turns glamorous, intimate, haunting, and surreal.

The relationship between Monroe and the camera was symbiotic. Early modelling assignments in the 1940s led to magazine covers and film contracts, but her transformation into a cultural phenomenon was inextricably linked to the work of key photographers who not only recognised her star quality but also helped construct and deconstruct her image.

One of the earliest and most significant was Andre de Dienes, a Hungarian-American photographer who met Monroe in 1945, when she was still Norma Jeane. Their photographic collaboration spanned several years, producing a wide range of images, from beachside portraits in Malibu to spontaneous road trip sessions. De Dienes captured a Monroe untouched by stardom: playful, natural, often unguarded. These early portraits offer glimpses of the woman before the myth took hold.

By the 1950s, as Monroe's fame soared, she worked with a number of established photographers, none more influential than Milton H. Greene. A former fashion photographer for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, Greene brought a refined, editorial style to his sessions with Monroe. Between 1953 and 1957, they created over 50 sessions together, including the famous "Black Sitting" and "The Ballerina Sitting". The latter, featuring Monroe in an ill-fitting tulle dress, is particularly revealing: beneath the glamour lies a palpable fragility. Greene’s images suggest a Monroe who was not merely performing but also participating in the shaping of her own image.

Their professional relationship eventually evolved into a business partnership. Together, they formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, signalling her attempt to control her career and public persona. During this period, Greene’s photographs reflected that ambition. Rather than merely showcasing a starlet, they framed her as a thoughtful, self-aware woman striving for artistic recognition.

Richard Avedon, known for his dynamic and psychologically incisive portraits, offered a more conceptual view. In 1957, he photographed Monroe as part of a series for Life magazine, asking her to impersonate various legendary actresses of the silent film era, including Theda Bara and Lillian Russell. Avedon was interested in Monroe as both subject and performance. He later remarked that once the camera stopped clicking, she fell into silence, all energy drained. His most telling image from the shoot, however, is the one where Monroe isn't performing at all: sitting quietly, eyes cast downward, a haunting study of solitude.

Another revealing set of images came from Eve Arnold, one of the few women to photograph Monroe extensively. Arnold, a member of Magnum Photos, approached her subjects with an almost journalistic sensitivity. Their collaboration began in 1951 and continued over a decade. Perhaps the most iconic of Arnold’s images was taken on the set of The Misfits in 1960, the final completed film of Monroe’s career. The photograph shows her seated alone in the Nevada desert, script in hand, hair tousled by the wind. There's both a starkness and a vulnerability that speaks to the pressures she faced near the end of her life.

It is impossible to examine Monroe’s photographic legacy without discussing Bert Stern and the controversial "Last Sitting". Commissioned by Vogue in June 1962, the three-day session took place just six weeks before her death. Stern shot over 2,500 images, many of them nudes or semi-nudes, using soft lighting, transparent scarves, and wine glasses as props. Some frames were scratched through with lipstick—Monroe’s own rejection of how she was portrayed. Despite the playful tone of some images, there is an eerie tension that runs through the series. Her expression flickers between seduction and exhaustion. Monroe would never see the published photographs.

In her lifetime, she was objectified and idolised in equal measure. Yet many of the photographers who worked closely with her sought to go beyond surface allure. Their lenses captured not just a sex symbol, but an actress and a woman, shaped by trauma, fame, and a yearning for authenticity. The range of portrayals—joyful, melancholic, sensual, defiant—has left behind an unparalleled visual archive.

Photography helped build the myth of Marilyn Monroe, but it also provides clues to the reality beneath it. Each frame is a negotiation between persona and person, between what she projected and what she protected. For photographers, she was both muse and mystery. For history, she remains a subject of endless fascination. And for photography itself, she was an ideal study in light and shadow, performance and truth.

Monroe’s image has been endlessly reproduced, referenced, and reinterpreted, from Andy Warhol’s pop art silkscreens to modern fashion editorials. Yet the original photographs retain a singular power. They remind us not only of Monroe’s ethereal beauty but also of the humanity that flickered just behind the eyes. It is that humanity, uncertain, radiant, wounded, that makes her enduringly compelling.

In the end, the most memorable photographs of Marilyn Monroe are not the ones where she dazzles in sequins, but those in which she simply exists, caught in a moment of stillness, somewhere between the image and the woman.