This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. As aunique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, the Last Sitting®it is the world's finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe.

In a statement considered provocative in its day, Mr. Stern told a panel of commercial artists in 1959, “I like to put my feelings into my photographs.” That same year he received an assignment that took some effort to connect with his feelings: the makers of Spam asked him to “romanticize shish kebab made from Spam,” he told The New York Times. Mr. Stern took a crew of helpers and models to the Gulf of Mexico to shoot that one — a dreamy shot of that meat product. The client was pleased. Kannamma came out in 2004 as transgender and soon began devoting her time to social activism, fighting for the rights of transgender people -- known in India as "hijras." But her current campaign -- which she is running on a very tight budget -- focuses on other issues too. For example, she hopes to develop the city's infrastructure and rid its systems of corruption. For Stern, taking photographs was like making love — an intense, emotional experience. “I fell in love with everybody I photographed,” he says today. His photographs of Monroe, taken over three days in June 1962 in the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, were collected in a mammoth 2000 book, “Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting.” “It was a one-time-in-a-lifetime experience, to have Marilyn Monroe in a hotel room,” Mr. Stern said in the 2010 documentary “Bert Stern: Original Madman,” “even though it was turned into a studio, where I could do anything I wanted.” Ms. Laumeister directed the film. Many of the photos showed Monroe unclothed, or posing behind transparent scarves. “She was so beautiful at that time,” Mr. 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.” Just a few days after India's Supreme Court recognized a "third gender" option, a transgender woman in India is vying for a seat in parliament.

Beginning today, visitors to the Paris exhibition hall (and car dealer) DS World can experience the elegance and vulnerability of Stern’s series in the exhibition “ Marilyn, the Last Sitting,” on view until January 6, 2018. The photos are featured alongside DS car models, including a rare, bright-red DS 21 Cabriolet from 1966. On the theatrical release of a remarkably candid and revealing feature-length documentary on his life, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, TIME sat down with Stern at his New York apartment to talk about his passions (women and photography), advertising, inspiration and Marilyn. Bert Stern‘s pictures of Marilyn Monroe, now known as “The Last Sitting”, are some of the most memorable images depicting the actress.

This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. It is a unique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, and it is the world's finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe.In the summer of 1962, Bert Stern was hired by Vogue to shoot a series of photos of Marilyn Monroe. The photos would become known as “The Last Sitting” and were later published in a book by that same name. As the decade drew to a close, he opened and outfitted the first photo super studio where he made photographs for prestigious editorial clients and advertising campaigns — conveyer belt style — working on as many as seven shoots a day. He also began to experiment with his own self-funded “art” projects. Stern, it seemed, could do no wrong. “I was having a great time. Life was all work, work was all life.” But by the late Sixties, things began to unravel. Stern excavated and preserved the poignant humanity of the real woman—beautiful, but also fragile, needy, flawed—from the monumental sex symbol. In our armored, airbrushed age, his achievement feels almost revolutionary. Stern appeared in a 2011 documentary profile, Bert Stern: Original Madman, in which he expressed his discomfort at having the camera turned on himself. The film was directed by Shannah Laumeister, whom he married in 2009. She survives him, along with his children, Trista, Susannah and Bret, from his marriage to Kent, which ended in divorce.

After being discharged from the service at war’s end, Stern was undecided whether to pursue art direction or still photography. Flair had closed and Bramson now worked for a small advertising agency, Lawrence C. Gumbinner. He invited Stern to experiment with him on a campaign for Smirnoff vodka. The company wanted to switch from drawings to photography. Stern shot test stills for layouts — which were approved — and when Irving Penn turned down the job Stern was awarded the campaign. But by the early Seventies Stern’s exhausting, Blow-Up-like lifestyle — fueled by amphetamines and shadowed by overhead costs—had drained him. He was hospitalized; his marriage crumbled. Broke, he left New York for Spain. He had lost virtually everything. The year all of Bert’s dreams came true. He proposed shooting Marilyn for Vogue, and Vogue said yes. Walking on 5th avenue with a Martini glass filled with water, for inspiration, Stern noticed the Plaza hotel was inverted in the glass that acted like a lens and turned the image upside down. “I came up with the idea to photograph the Pyramid of Giza upside down in the glass — but I would have to go to Egypt to do it.” This book is really two books. It is a biography, and it is also a pictorial retrospective of an actress whose greatest love affair was conceivably with the camera,” wrote Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography, Marilyn.Vogue ultimately decided to run the article using all of the same selections they had originally planned to use, with the addition of text explaining to readers their position. I have nothing to fear," Kannamma said, "and I have no vested interest in being corrupt and the people see that."

The resulting film, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, is a candid and revealing portrait of the photographer — in Laumeister’s words, it’s “an imperfect movie … dealing with the controversial nature of who people are. We are all contradictory, and if you turn a camera on anyone’s life they’ll have plenty of reason to hide.” He writes very candidly in this book about his great desire to have Marilyn if he could. How did this go from a Vogue fashion shoot to a nude shoot? Born in New York City in 1929, Bert Stern was a self-taught photographer who rose to the top if the industry as both a fashion and advertising photographer. He started out taking photos of his mother and sister with a second-hand camera, and a passion was born. March, 1962: Vogue arranges a shoot in Los Angeles and Bert does presumably what any man would do had they been allowed an intimate day and night with Marilyn Monroe. He had reserved them a suite at the Bel-Air Hotel; for the art of photography, of course. Although Bert later writes, "making love and making photographs were closely connected in my mind when it came to women,” which makes me question how appropriate this "professional" day actually was. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.is aware of the fact that she had her drink spiked with 100% vodka, yet supplies more and more alcohol during the shoot In the summer of 1962 Bert Stern, who has died aged 83, took more than 2,500 photographs of Marilyn Monroe over three sessions held in a Los Angeles hotel. The images captured Monroe in a sometimes pensive but mostly playful mood as she posed nude, variously covered by bedsheets, a chinchilla coat, a stripy Vera Neumann scarf and a pair of chiffon roses. Despite their air of carefree humour, the portraits are inescapably wistful because – along with George Barris's subsequent pictures of Monroe at Santa Monica beach – they are among the last photographs taken of the star. She was found dead at her home several weeks later. As a new season of Mad Men premieres, it’s perfectly fitting that the original mad man, Bert Stern, is receiving the accolades that his remarkable life and career deserve. He took the quintessential pictures of Marilyn Monroe,” Laumeister says, “and that work can sometimes trump [everything else he’s done]. There are so many more photos, even of Marilyn, and the show is representative of his wider work and ideas.”