Although it has been more than fifty years since her death, Marilyn Monroe is still the number one representative of blondes. During her 18-year star career, countless photographers have held up their cameras for her, climbing high, bending down, and lying on the ground to find the best angles, including Milton H Greene and Douglas Kirkland.
From today to October 11, Shanghai Baoku Art Center will display Marilyn Monroe through the lenses of these two photographers. In terms of quantity, this exhibition is not dominant at all, consisting of only 31 limited edition photos. They were taken from 1953 to 1961, and some have never been made public. Joshua Greene, the son of Douglas Kirkland and Milton H Greene, who is over eighty years old, flew from the United States specially to stand for the exhibition "Meeting Monroe".
“We were very young when we met her. I was only 27 years old, and my mind was probably only 17. I had just come to New York from a small town near Toronto, Canada, to work for Look magazine. ”Nowadays, Douglas Kirkland, who has white hair, can hardly overlap with the image of the boy in the photoshoots back then. The bi-weekly "Look" for which he worked is a typical example of pictures being better than words. Its circulation peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, ranking first in sales alongside "Life" magazine at the same time.
In 1961, "Look" invited Marilyn Monroe to prepare for its 25th anniversary issue. She and movie emperor Clark Gable's feature film "The Misfits" was just released in the spring of the same year. The heroine in the play is lonely, fragile, and insecure, which is completely different from the "Some Like It Hot" that helped her win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress two years ago.
“Marilyn Monroe was a superstar at that time. I flew from New York to California to meet her, and I was so excited when I rang the doorbell. ”During his decades of experience in the industry, Douglas Kirkland has shot films for countless celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Coco Chanel, and Pierre Cardin. But in view of the public's endless curiosity about Monroe, he couldn't avoid this shooting in every interview - the story of "love at three sights" was circulated in books and on the Internet.
When he first met Monroe, she was dressed like a girl next door, but she already had a clear idea: silk sheets. Therefore, this series of photography works was named "Sleeping with Marilyn Monroe" ("In Bed with Marilyn"). Three days later, she appeared at the Beverly Hills studio, playing her friend Frank Sinatra's records and sipping the prepared Dom Pérignon champagne. "You can almost reach her just by stretching out your hand," the photographer hiding behind the camera almost pressed the shutter button to cover up his inner excitement, "My heart almost jumped out of my chest."
Unexpectedly, Marilyn Monroe was not satisfied after reading it. "She was quite harsh on herself, and she drank some wine that day, so she was not in the best condition." Five months later, Douglas Kirkland received the bad news of Monroe's death while they were filming Coco Chanel in France. He still remembered what Coco said at the time: "It's so pitiful."
For a long time after Marilyn Monroe's death, the photos could not be released due to copyright issues. After Milton H Greene passed away in 1985, his son collected "old photos" and tried to use technology to restore them. "Some of the photos were really pressed to the bottom of the box, with fingerprints all over them. It took hundreds of hours to restore each one." ”Joshua Greene has now set up a company and also shoots himself.
Because of his father, he met Monroe when he was 2 or 3 years old, and he is now 60 years old. “The number of photographers who took pictures of her (Marilyn Monroe) was not 100, but 50. "Joshua Greene talked about the four years his father worked with Monroe, that is, 1953-1957, "It cannot be said to be her golden age, but it was a very important period of transformation."
When the two first met, Milton H Greene was 31 years old and Monroe was 27 years old. They took more than 5,000 photos during this period, some of which appeared on the covers of Look and Life magazines. Photographers kept trying to persuade her to stay away from the silly and sweet route of the hourglass blonde. “If you look at the fashion videos my father shot, this is not his style. ”Jane Fonda, Cary Grant, Paul Newman and other celebrities who appear under the lens of Milton H Greene mostly have natural styles.
In fact, after Monroe ended her marriage to basketball star Jow DiMaggio, she became very close to the Greene family and even opened the film production company Marilyn Monroe Productions together. In Joshua's memoirs, the goddess often visited their country home in Connecticut and even took care of herself.
Under the lens of partner Milton Greene, Marilyn Monroe was given a variety of character settings, such as a ballet dancer, an innocent girl, and a street girl. It wasn't until she met her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, that they gradually became estranged. "Just a week before Monroe passed away, my father received a call inviting him to meet in Los Angeles. "Joshua Greene said, it's a pity that he was in Paris when the accident happened."
