LAWRENCE SCHILLER | Photographs at Steven Kasher Gallery through June 30

Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand on the set of "Let's Make Love, 1960"
Photo by Lawrence Schiller, © Polaris Communications, Inc.
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Marilyn Monroe, 1962
Photo by Lawrence Schiller, © Polaris Communications, Inc.
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Marilyn Monroe and Wally Cox.
Monroe's 36th Birthday Party. June 1st, 1962
Photo by Lawrence Schiller, © Polaris Communications, Inc.
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.

Self-Portrait, Lawrence Schiller, 2012

Wiener/Schiller Archives

Lawrence Schiller began his career as a successful photojournalist with Look, Life, Paris Match, making a name for himself with exclusive photographs of Marilyn Monroe, many taken on the set of her unfinished last film, George Cukor’s Something’s Got To Give, 1962.

"I had three Gods in my life in Photography. One was Yousuf Karsh, one was W. Eugene Smith and one was Dick Avedon. There was another one who was a kind of semi-God, which was Hiro, who was Dick’s assistant for a lot of years...he did extraordinary work."

Lawrence Schiller's exquisite exhibition
Marilyn & Me
Steven Kasher Gallery

"...a contact sheet she killed all except the one frame"

Contact Sheet, Marilyn Monroe "Let’s Make Love,"1960
Photo by Lawrence Schiller, © Polaris Communications, Inc.
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.

Let’s Make Love, Marilyn Monroe, 1960.
Photo by Lawrence Schiller, © Polaris Communications, Inc.
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

"With the precision of a surgeon, Schiller slices through the façade of Marilyn Monroe in his unflinching memoir. Revealing and readable, it’s a book I couldn’t put down." —Tina Brown

"In the new book (Marilyn & Me: A Memoir in Words & Photographs, Taschen Books 2012), there are at least thirty images that came from the shooting for Look Magazine. I’m not exaggerating, until last year I had never looked at that shooting since the day the film was sent into Look Magazine and Marilyn approved the contact sheets. They went into the Look Library, I owned the copyright. Look ran one picture of mine, some with Bob Vose, some with Guy Villet and John Bryson, who was a God to me. I just never looked at it. Now I look at it and I come up with this image, the first picture I ever shot of her. This picture [above] was never published; it’s on the cover of the Talese book (Marilyn & Me, Nan A. Talese/Random House). It comes from a contact sheet she killed all except the one frame. She said to me as I’m shooting, “Oh you’ll never get a good picture from that angle. Go over there where the light will be better and I’ll show you what a good picture is.” Then she turns and that’s that. Over fifty-two years I never looked at this contact sheet..." as told to me in Le Journal de la Photographie. Read the Interview with Lawrence Schiller here.