Bert Stern

Bert Stern, 1962
Photo by Irving Penn

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Bert Stern
(1929 - 2013)

Bertram Stern (New York City October 3, 1929 – June 26, 2013) was an American fashion and celebrity portrait photographer.

His best known work is arguably The Last Sitting, a collection of 2,500 photographs taken of Marilyn Monroe over a three-day period, six weeks before her death, taken for Vogue. Stern published Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting in 1992.

Bert Stern, one of the legendary figures in contemporary photography, personified the commercial photographer as cultural hero in the 1960s. Hugely successful in the worlds of fashion and advertising photography, in the late 1960s he operated a studio, not unlike Andy Warhol’s Factory, from which he created countless award-winning ads, editorial features, magazine covers, films, and portraits. His name is firmly associated with the golden age of advertising, and many of his images are classics.

Stern’s meteoric rise in the 1960s advertising world is represented by such images as his vodka advertisement in which an Egyptian pyramid is seen inverted in a martini glass. Besides working for such clients as IBM, Vogue, Glamour, Life, Revlon, and Smirnoff, he was highly acclaimed for his portraits of celebrities including Gary Cooper and Louis Armstrong. His portraits of stars ranging from Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn to Drew Barrymore, including the spellbinding 1962 “last sitting” photographs of Marilyn Monroe, form a gallery of the most beautiful women of our time. In the 1960s, he became the American prototype of the fashion photographer as media star, and his pictures of models from Twiggy to Iman have become icons to a new generation of photographers. In all of Stern’s works can be seen the remarkable graphic simplicity of his photographic art, as well as his extraordinary rapport with his subjects.

Born in Brooklyn, New York and self-taught in photography, Stern began his career as assistant to art director Hershel Bramson at Look magazine from 1946 to 1948. Between 1949 and 1951, he was art director at Mayfair magazine, after which he rejoined Bramson at L.C. Gumbiner advertising agency, and helped create the modern advertising photograph. In 1954, he opened the first of four studios in New York, the last closing in 1971. Between 1971 and 1975, Stern lived in Spain. Since 1976, he has continued working in New York on personal as well as commercial assignments.

Bert Stern
Photo by Neilson Barnard

Talking Talent

Bert Stern

by Laurent Tabach-Bank

April 4, 2013, 11:30 AM

Bert Stern, iconic American photographer of screen sirens Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, has died. The following is our interview from April 2013.

The 83-year-old iconic American photographer Bert Stern, famous for shooting ad campaigns as well as endless screen sirens, will show some never-before-seen images of his famous “last sitting” with Marilyn Monroe at the Staley-Wise Gallery in SoHo today. In conjunction, the filmmaker Shannah Laumeister turns the lens on Stern himself with her no-holds-barred documentary “Bert Stern: Original Mad Man,” which opens on Friday. In the film, Stern is quite candid about his rise from a mailroom boy at Look Magazine in the 1950s to shooting Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra, along with his often dark struggles with love, marriage, addiction, financial fallouts and his passion for photography — the one aspect of his life that continues to remain true.

What inspired you to agree to make “Bert Stern: The Original Mad Man”?

The girl, Shannah, who made the movie, is a girl I met when she was 13 and I spent about 20 years photographing, and when she grew up she decided she wanted to make a movie about me. She got interested in films. It wasn’t too hard with her because I like her and she was around a lot, and so it didn’t bother me. I just don’t like being photographed very much.

But you had a camera in your face a great deal to make this.

Yeah, I don’t like being photographed. I don’t do well on camera. I only agreed to do on-camera stuff with her. Because I like her.

Do you think that people will be surprised by how candid you are about your life story?

Well, I’ve got nothing much to hide, so … it is what it is.

There you go. And so I assume you don’t regret anything that you said in it?

I don’t regret anything I said, no. But if I had to live my life over, I certainly would have changed some things. I got into so much trouble with my first marriage with Allegra Kent.

At the beginning of the movie, there’s a quote from you that reads, “I’ve always loved women. I think being a woman must be very difficult. After all, you’re always on the inside.” I’m curious what you mean by that.

I think women are kind of essential. Everything passes through women, and I think they do most of the work in the world, actually.

In a physical way?

In a lot of ways. Women are very essential.

You worked in the mailroom at Look Magazine when then staff photographer Stanley Kubrick befriended you. What was surprising about the notoriously private Kubrick?

He was a great chess player. I used to watch him play chess in Washington Square Park. We were pals when we were both young. He was a wonderful chess player. He was a genius.

Have you spent your entire life in New York?

I was brought up in Brooklyn, and I lived most of the rest of my life in New York City.

How has New York changed in the past 50 years?

I don’t see any change.

Do you think that photography has changed in the past 50 years?

It’s all digital now. It’s much slicker because it’s technologically advanced.

Bert Stern’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

Is there any particular photographer working today whose work you admire?

No.

Who was the most challenging person you ever shot?

I don’t know. I guess everybody’s challenging. Usually they ask who’s my favorite. And it’s Marilyn Monroe.

Why do you think the world was, and continues to be, so infatuated with her?

That’s a good one. That’s what they ask me. She’s so American. The American girl.

Do you think her physical appearance would be as popular today as it was in the ’50s?

I think there’s only one Marilyn, so I don’t know. I guess so.

But it seems like the shape of women today is so very different than it was back then, or what’s glamorized.

Well, I don’t know, there’s always some girl. Now it seems to be this girl Kate Upton. She looks interesting to me. I’ve never met her, but I would like to photograph her, if you asked me if there’s anybody I would like to photograph.

Who would you love to shoot that you never had the opportunity to shoot?

I told you. Kate Upton.

But what about like an Angelia Jolie or someone like that?

No, I’m not interested in her.

It’s really just about Kate?

At the moment.

Were you ever interested in shooting men, or only women?

I like men. You know, Gary Cooper, Marcello Mastroianni. There’s always interesting men.

How do you feel about being called a Mad Man in the film’s title?

Well, I think Mad Man refers to advertising, to the show “Mad Men.” I started my career in advertising and made a mark there, when I first started in photography. I was very successful in advertising. So some guy in advertising — I forget his name, he’s in the movie — he called me the original Mad Man, and that kind of became the title for the film.

But people could also read it another way. Considering your wild antics and colorful life.

Well, I think that’s true too. A little crazy, yeah.

Do you agree with that?

Yes.

Do you think the show “Mad Men” is a good representation of advertising in the 1960s?

Yes, I do. I think it’s, um, it’s a little bit later than when I started. I started in advertising with my first Smirnoff ad in 1953 after I got out of the army. But I think it’s pretty good.

“The Pill Book” put you back on the map, after a low point in your career. What inspired you to shoot the iconic cover of that book?

It’s very handy. When I was younger and seeing a therapist during problems with my marriage to Allegra, some doctor had given me a thing called Dexedrine to take if I was tired in the afternoon, and he said, “Well, you shouldn’t be taking that.” So he brought this big book out of his bookshelf, and he said, “Could you show me which one it is?” So I said, “Oh, that’s a far-out book. It has pictures.” So years later when I had problems and I came back from my troubled days in Spain, and I had many problems, I remembered that idea. And I visited a publisher that was doing a book on pills, and I noticed it had no pictures in it. So I thought it was a good time to activate that idea, and I knew that it would be very popular.

And it was huge.

Huge.

It still is.

Still is, yeah. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore, but it became huge, and is huge.

Did you ever want to make another film after making “Jazz on a Summer’s Day”? Or did you ever make another film?

I made some Twiggy documentaries that were on ABC. But I think making films is quite a task. So I’m involved with Shannah, we’re working on a script for a feature based on the documentary, but that’s about it.

Are you still shooting a lot?

No, not too much. I’m archiving. It’s much more difficult.

So it’s really always been about photography?

I’ve always been about being a photographer.

Magazine

Marilyn in the Nude, Lolita in the Sun,

Martinis in Egypt: Bert Stern's Lost Lens

by Esther Zuckerman

JUN 27, 2013

Bert Stern, who died Tuesday at the age of 83, was perhaps best known for his raw, uninhibited photograph of Marilyn Monroe lounging in a hotel room just six weeks before she died. But many of Stern's lucid, eye-popping images entered the collective consciousness. Stern was called an "original madmen," according to a recent documentary, and Paul Vitello wrote in his New York Times obituary that Stern was "part of a generation of photographers who made clear, clutter-free, arresting images the language of glossy magazine advertising, which until then had mainly used pictures to illustrate text." To remember him, let's look at some of his most iconic images.

Marilyn, 1962

Shot for Vogue magazine, Stern's photos of Marilyn—who poses in various states of undress—are tinged with sadness due to their proximity to her death. Per the Times obit, Stern told Newsday: "I didn't say, 'Pose nude.' It was more one thing leading to another: You take clothes off and off and off and off and off. She thought for a while. I'd say something and the pose just led to itself." In 2008 Stern would recreate recreated the shoot for New York with another troubled starlet: Lindsay Lohan.

Lolita, 1960

Stern shot images like this one for Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita. As Steven Heller wrote in The Atlantic, Stern directly undercut the studio's wishes to downplay the scandalous nature of the subject matter. "Movie posters are rarely more than mediocre sales tools, but Stern could not abide mediocrity," Hell wrote. "What's more, he couldn't resist the temptation to be bad. So, while driving [actress Sue] Lyon to the photo shoot, Stern recalled that he serendipitously found the sunglasses in Woolworths, bought them, put them on Lyons and instantly had the perfect shot—the studio be damned."

SMIRNOFF, GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA, 1955

This Smirnoff vodka advertisement was, according to Vitello, the way Stern "made his mark." It was called "the most influential break with traditional advertising photography."

Stern's film documenting the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival features performances from the likes of Thelonius Monk and Dinah Washington and has a home in the Library of Congress..

Twiggy, 1967

Stern said his favorite subjects were models, like Twiggy. "What makes a great model is her need, her desire; and it’s exciting to photograph desire," he said.

The Atlantic Wire

GALLERY
Marilyn Monroe