George Barris: A Biography
George Barris was an American photographer and photojournalist whose work moved between wartime assignments, editorial picture stories, and Hollywood portraiture. Best known for his 1962 photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Barris spent a long career photographing public figures with an eye for the person behind the public image.
Barris was born on June 14, 1922, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to Joseph and Eva Barris, Romanian immigrants. On his sixth birthday, his older brother Willie gave him a box camera. He soon learned the basic mechanics of photography—loading film, developing negatives, and making prints—and began photographing people and events around New York.
As a teenager, Barris sold photographs and brought picture-story ideas to newspaper and magazine editors. The work gave him an early understanding of photography as both craft and communication: an image had to be legible, immediate, and capable of carrying a story.
During World War II, he served as an official photographer for the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945. His assignments included coverage of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory homecoming celebration. After the war, he continued as a freelance photographer, producing picture stories and editorial work for publications including Parade.
Over the following decades, Barris photographed many of the major screen personalities of his era, among them Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, and Steve McQueen. His photographs belong to the period when magazines offered audiences something beyond the formal studio still: a closer view of celebrities in motion, at work, or briefly at ease.
Marilyn Monroe
Barris met Marilyn Monroe in 1954, while she was in New York for The Seven Year Itch. They remained friends for nearly a decade. In 1962, Monroe was planning a book in her own voice and asked Barris to photograph her for the project.
They worked together during June and July of that year, at Santa Monica beach and at a private house in the Hollywood Hills. Barris photographed in daylight, without the elaborate staging of a studio session. Monroe selected the clothes, brought her own hairdresser and makeup artist, Whitey Snyder, and helped establish the atmosphere of the work.
The resulting series has come to be known as The Last Photos. Monroe appears in a swimsuit, wrapped in towels and robes, sitting in the sand, or wearing a sweater at the beach. The photographs are informal without being accidental. They retain the sense of a trusted photographer working with a subject who understood exactly how often her image had been controlled by others.
Barris made the final photographs of the series on July 13, 1962, only weeks before Monroe’s death. They are frequently described as her last professional photographs, though the description is not exclusive: Bert Stern’s Vogue session and Allan Grant’s photographs for LIFE also belong to her final months before the camera. Barris’s series has endured because it was made under different conditions. Monroe initiated the work, and the images preserve something of that authority.
Later Years
Monroe’s book was not completed during her lifetime. Barris later published Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words in 1995, drawing on the photographs and material associated with their final sessions. He also spent roughly twenty years living in Paris before returning to California.
Barris died on September 30, 2016, at his home in Thousand Oaks, California, at age ninety-four. His reputation rests largely on the Monroe photographs, but they represent one part of a career that extended from early newspaper work and military photography to the portraits of some of the twentieth century’s most recognizable figures.
For collectors, Barris’s photographs carry both a documentary record and the character of the original photographic object. In the Monroe series especially, the quality lies in the combination of circumstance and execution: daylight, proximity, an unforced setting, and a sitter allowed to determine how she would be seen.