With Love, Marilyn Monroe # 2

     

With Love from, 

"The Last Sitting"

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:

 Sleepy-eyed and naked, Marilyn 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, MM was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose.

The photos endure partly as artifacts as the last visible evidence of the living woman (a legacy reinforced by Stern’s decision to publish the contact sheets Marilyn herself had crossed out in red marker). But the pictures are also remarkable for the raw truths they seem to reveal. In them, we see an actress whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal, a woman who is cannily aware of her pinup status, yet is also beginning to show her 36 years. In many shots, she is obviously drunk. This was an unhappy time for MM. Notorious for her on-set antics, she had been publicly lambasted by Billy Wilder after Some Like It Hot, then fired from the production of Something’s Got to Give;she’d endured two recent divorces and, in 1961, a brief stint in a psychiatric ward.


Stern excavated and preserved the poignant humanity of the real woman—beautiful, but also fragile, needy, flawed—from the monumental sex symbol. In our armoured, airbrushed age, his achievement feels almost revolutionary.The photo shoot was commissioned by Vogue magazine in late June 1962, taking place over three daily sessions, just six weeks before she died.
Bert Stern first published The Last Sitting in 1982. The book included a large number of the over 2,500 images that Stern had shot, including contact sheets with images Monroe had disliked and crossed out. In the book, Stern recounted being enchanted by Monroe until a near-intimate encounter after the second day of shooting; he then realized that she was deeply troubled.

Here I've tried to capture Marilyn's playful nature in these photos. The many limitations of Stardoll have really disabled my efforts to make them as accurate as possible but hopefully you can still make out the basic idea behind them. This is just my best effort to bring light to some of Marilyn's most raw photo's available to the public. You can't deny the amazing appeal and interest of a woman such a Marilyn. Her enduring beauty and grace has captivated many fans into recreating "The Last Sitting". Lindsey Lohan did her best to replicate the famous photoshoot in the spring of 08' with Bert Stern, who also took the photos, nearly 46 years after he had taken the originals. 

Thanks for Reading

With Love, The Fear