Marilyn Monroe’s Last Photos: George Barris and the Pictures She Made for Herself
For seventeen years, Marilyn Monroe stood before cameras commissioned by others. Studios photographed her to construct a fantasy; magazines photographed her to circulate it. Most photographers were working to assignment, asked to capture a version of Monroe that the public had already decided it possessed. From the wartime factory photographs that first brought her notice in 1945 through the summer of her death, nearly every image was made for someone else’s purpose. The Last Photos were the exception. Monroe commissioned them herself.
The Summer of 1962
By the summer of 1962, Monroe’s life seemed to be unraveling and re-forming at once. She had divorced Arthur Miller the previous year. She had bought her first house—a modest home in Brentwood—and was living there alone. In May, she traveled to New York, was sewn into a nearly transparent beaded gown, and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John Kennedy before a crowd at Madison Square Garden and a television audience of millions. Rumors concerning Monroe and the Kennedys emerged around that time and never wholly receded.
A few weeks later, Fox dismissed her from Something’s Got to Give for missed days on set, sued her, and informed the press that her career was finished. It was not. She was already pressing to return to the production, and the studio would rehire her only days before her death.
Amid this, Monroe chose to speak for herself. She planned a book: her words and her account of her life. She asked George Barris to photograph it. They had known one another since 1954, when they met on the set of The Seven Year Itch, and she trusted him.
A Shoot on Her Terms
Barris and Monroe worked for several weeks in June and July, at Santa Monica beach and at a house in the Hollywood Hills lent by a friend. There were no studio lights and no publicity department directing her pose. Monroe brought her own hairdresser and makeup artist, Whitey Snyder, who had worked on her face for fifteen years. She wore Pucci—the clothes she chose when no one was looking.
Barris worked in daylight. The photographs retain that informality: Monroe selecting the clothing, the collaborators, and the atmosphere, rather than arriving to be arranged. They are images of a subject exercising unusual authority over the conditions in which she was seen.
Which “Last Photos”?
These images are often described as Marilyn Monroe’s last photographs, a description that is broadly accurate but not exclusive. Bert Stern had photographed her for Vogue in June; that session became the widely known The Last Sitting, although Barris photographed her afterward. In July, Allan Grant visited Monroe at her Brentwood home for LIFE, making the images that accompanied her final interview in the week of her death. Those photographs, too, are often called her last sitting. Monroe remained before the camera almost until the end.
Stern, Grant, and the studio photographers who preceded them were working on assignment. Barris was helping a friend who wanted, perhaps for the first time in her career, to be photographed on her own terms. That distinction gives the series an ease absent from many of the others: Monroe with her guard lowered, at moments appearing simply to play herself.
What Remains
The book was completed, though not by Monroe. In 1986, Gloria Steinem built Marilyn: Norma Jeane around Barris’s photographs, completing the project Monroe had begun and the record she hoped to set straight. Barris later recounted those weeks in his 1995 book, Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words. For four decades, the photographs have appeared in galleries and at auction, where they have long been familiar to serious collectors.
The surviving prints carry the full history of the project: drawn from Barris’s negatives, hand signed, and published by the legendary Weston Collection. No further signed prints can be made. Barris died in 2016, and a signature cannot be reproduced. What remains is the close of a seventeen-year photographic story, preserved in the only images Monroe had a real hand in making her own.
FATHOM is pleased to offer a selection of the remaining prints from The Last Sitting by George Barris (comming later this fall).