Bert Stern

The U.S. fashion and advertising photographer Bert Stern was born on October 3, 1929 in Brooklyn, New York. Bert Stern became world famous through the photo session "The Last Sitting" with Marilyn Monroe, commissioned by "Vogue" magazine. But also as a fashion and advertising photographer, the self-taught Bert Stern is one of the stylistically most influential photographers of the 1950s and 1960s, along with Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Famous fashion and advertising photographer of the 1960s. Iconically anchored in the world memory is the Smirnoff advertising photo from 1955, for which Bert Stern photographs the glass of vodka in front of the pyramids of Giza. Bert Stern is one of the pioneers of advertising photography in the 1960s, arranging advertising photos for their fresh new and direct style in such a way that the ad pages are hardly distinguishable from the editorial pages. The Last Sitting with Marilyn Monroe. In June 1962, Bert Stern is commissioned by "Vogue" to photograph Marilyn Monroe at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles. It is Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoot, just six weeks before her sudden death. In the three days that the shoot lasts, Bert Stern takes 2,571 photos of the famous actress, who already has cult status as a sex symbol during her lifetime. On some contact prints of the fashion, portrait and nude photos, Marilyn Monroe scratches or censors the shots in which she is shot unflattering in her eyes. But these slides, marked with nail polish or scratched with a hairpin, are also kept. At the time, "Vogue" printed only eight of the black-and-white shots in the magazine. In 1992, the entire material was published as a monumental volume of photographs, "The Complete Last Sitting", which, in the abundance of shots, first revealed the intense relationship between photographer and model, the eroticism of the encounter, but above all the beauty and tragedy of Monroe. Bert Stern died on June 26, 2013 in Manhattan, New York.