The white corolla of Marilyn’s skirt lifted by the draft from the subway grate, at the corner of 52e Rue and 5e Avenue… Invited by Billy Wilder onto the set of The Seven Year Itch in 1954, Sam Shaw gets as close as possible to what is unfolding. As close as possible to the flesh, bathed in a light as radiant as that of stars whose shimmer continues to reach us, even though they went dark long ago. What can be said about Marilyn Monroe that has not already been written, told, and repeated endlessly?
Too many words, too many clichés, too many prints produced ad infinitum and discussed to exhaustion. The most exposed platinum blonde in the world. And yet, in the portraits the New York photographer took of the actress between 1954 and 1958, something of the mystery is revealed to us. The intensity of a life. Its beauty. And its vulnerability. Their first meeting dates back to the filming of Viva Zapata!, when Sam Shaw began working for various film studios. They became friends. In some respects, they were comrades-in-arms. In the arena of cinema—« Everyone says I can’t act. »—the photographer undeniably contributes to Marilyn’s performance. She feels at ease under Shaw’s gaze. Entirely caught up in the fervor of her budding love affair with the writer Arthur Miller, her third husband, she no longer wears her heart on her sleeve. The photographs gathered in these pages are all radiant images: Marilyn in the studio in the title role of Marilyn—ruby-red lips, a cotton-candy cloud of blonder-than-blonde curls… Of all the photographs collected in this small anthology, those taken at Roxbury, Miller’s property in Connecticut, are unforgettable. There is nothing spectacular about them. They capture moments of happy intimacy. Yet Shaw’s gaze has never been so tactile, making us feel the creamy pallor of that fresh-milk skin and enter the halo of softness and abandon surrounding this face left entirely to itself. On the back of one of the prints in which the couple is leaning against a tree, Marilyn had written: « Movies are my work, but Arthur is my life »—Perhaps. The boundary is fluid, porous for a woman who exposes herself, to the point of vertigo, to the art of doubling. The images of Marilyn at her dressing table, absorbed in the ritual ceremony of applying makeup, offer a disturbing mise en abyme in which both the distance and the closeness between herself and the Other are revealed. Norma Jean knew better than anyone how to capture, on the surface of the mirror, the dazzling reflection of Marilyn Monroe. To summon and unleash that exquisite, unstable Presence, study its expressions, and adopt its poses. To tame it until she could perform its role with irresistible grace. Sam Shaw’s photographs share in this power of incantation. Poets possess the gift of second sight. Truman Capote, in his incisive and dazzling portrait of the actress, compares Marilyn’s radiance to « a hummingbird in flight », whose poetry only a camera or a photographer’s watchful eye could capture… Yet this fleeting luminosity proves powerful enough to dispel the shadow of the little girl who never had a place and whom no one was waiting for anywhere. « I just want to be wonderful. Marilyn devoted all her art and talent to reaching that part of herself that most of us overlook or barely allow to show, that clarity of soul which Sam Shaw’s portraits reveal to us in all its fervor and breadth. « MARILYN: Remember. I said that if people ever asked what I was like, who Marilyn Monroe really was, what would you tell them? […] I bet you’d tell them I’m a nut. A lost soul. Truman Capote: Of course. But I’d also say… […] I’d say you are a radiant child.» (Truman Capote, « A Beautiful Child » in Music for Chameleons, Paris, Gallimard, 1982) Jérôme GODEAU
Source: paris.fr — photo: Lawrence SCHILLER, courtesy Galerie de l’Instant, Paris