Marilyn Monroe realized the power her physical attributes held long before anyone else did. By the time she was a young actress in Hollywood, amassing so much fan mail it startled executives, she had perfected her gaze. Her beauty, which seemed effortless and natural in photographs, was just another area of Monroe’s life that she sought to optimize.
“As her celebrity grew, Monroe negotiated a unique level of command over how images of herself were created; for the most part, she had veto power over who shot her and when, and she fought hard to retain approval over which shots could appear and which negatives must be destroyed. She viewed her work with photographers as an active collaboration. She needed the camera and the camera needed her; it was a fair transaction,” Rachel Syme writes. Read an excerpt from “Marilyn Monroe 100": www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/marily...