A century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains an alluring enigma. The actress, model, and singer is ingrained in American iconography, yet no matter how many photographs one pores over, there’s a sense you’ve only scratched the surface. To commemorate her birth, ACC Art Books has released Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book, a publication with the Marilyn Monroe Estate. Throughout its enveloping pages (including an introduction by the New Yorker’s Rachel Syme), 275 images articulate the numerous facets of Monroe, from the Norma Jean years to her very last photo shoot on the beach in Santa Monica.
The early pages of Marilyn Monroe 100 explore the star’s publicity photography and her relationship to the press, laying the groundwork for the book’s core: a detailed account of Monroe’s work with the key photographers she collaborated with. There are Cecil Beaton’s images of the “infectiously gay performance” Monroe delivered in the Ambassador Hotel; Richard Avedon’s evocative “Sad Marilyn” studio portrait; and, of course, Allan Grant’s photographs taken in Monroe’s Spanish Colonial-style Brentwood home. These images would be published in Life on August 3rd, 1962, alongside her final interview, the day before her untimely death.
The book takes care to highlight the intimate relationships—both professional and personal—she nurtured with photographers such as Milton H. Greene, Eve Arnold, and Sam Shaw. Some might be familiar with Shaw as the photographer who conceived the skirt-blowing image for The Seven Year Itch, but the creative partnership between him and Monroe spanned roughly a decade. “She was a friend first and foremost,” says Melissa Stevens, Shaw’s granddaughter and director of the family archives. The two met in Los Angeles in the early 1950s when Monroe offered to drive Shaw to and from set because, being a New Yorker, he didn’t have a driver’s license. “Sam recalled that even though Marilyn was young and out of work during that time, she did not ask him to pay for gas,” Stevens says. “He later wrote, ‘sex, lovers, beauty, fame—she never thought of fortune. She never fought for money except for the power money can buy: a good story, great directors.’”
When Monroe moved to New York in 1954, Shaw introduced her to his friends and showed her around the city. “He recalled that she loved New York and New York loved her,” Stevens says. Their creative partnership continued during this reinvention period on the East Coast, including a series in Amagansett. “On the beach, Sam gave Marilyn certain word cues, such as ‘Medusa’ and ‘Aphrodite’ and she responded with various poses,” Stevens shares, citing it as one of her favorite series due to the range and complexity Monroe embodied. “She is silly, sullen, jumping for joy, in love, alone, relaxed, contemplative, posing and not posing…”
After Monroe’s death, Shaw abstained from engaging with the tabloid frenzy and did not show his photographs of her out of respect. “He was uncomfortable profiting from his images of his friend,” Stevens explains. After about a decade passed, he finally began to share these photographs, and after Shaw’s death in 1999, the family discovered an archive of previously unseen photos of Monroe, along with letters between the two. “The letters between Sam and Marilyn are still a bit of a mystery,” says Stevens. She posits that Monroe must have saved the letters in her personal papers and they disappeared after her death. One day, the handwritten notes resurfaced in an auction, and the Shaw family was able to buy them back. “When they arrived and we read them, we laughed and cried because they are very Sam, totally his voice, his humor, his insight, with cartoons and jokes.”
What Shaw appreciated about Monroe, and what continues to resonate a century later, was her uncompromising free spirit. “She had personal freedom, but she did not live in a time and place that allowed her to be free,” Stevens says. “She gave herself permission and validation even when others did not. And she also found the joy and humor within the difficulty.”
Below, a selection of photographs from Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book, available now.
