Bert Stern began his career as a mailroom boy at Look Magazine. The launch of his career would coincide with his iconic and legendary campaign for Smirnoff Vodka in 1955. With the brilliance of that work, he became a star in the world of advertising. Editorial work followed and working for VOGUE put Bert Stern at the pinnacle of his career in the 1960’s. Sought-after by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and the international fashion scene for decades, Stern became the prototype of the fashion photographer as the embodiment of glamour - a legend himself.
Stern’s contract at VOGUE allowed him to photograph 10 pages of his own choice in the magazine. He chose to photograph Marilyn Monroe and the shoot took place at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in June 1962. Marilyn died shortly after on August 4, 1962 at the age of thirty-six and these photographs became known as “The Last Sitting”. In the intervening years her considerable fame has taken on mythic proportions, and it has been photographs which have fanned the flame of her celebrity.
Over 60 of the images from this sitting were exhibited in “Bert Stern: La Dernière Séance” at the Musée Maillol in Paris, France in 2007 – the first solo museum exhibition by the photographer. The exhibition then travelled to the Instituto Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2007), Centro Cultural de Cascais in Portugal (2011), the Forte Di Bard in Valle d’Aosta, Italy (2012), and The Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi, France (2015).
Stern’s photographs have been exhibited at and/or are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in Texas, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada, The J. Paul Getty Museum in California, the Musée Maillol in France, and the Hermitage Museum in Russia. Bert Stern died in 2013.