The Female Gaze: Eve Arnold’s intimate portrait of Marilyn

In 1950, an intoxicating ingénue named Marilyn Monroe set the silver screen ablaze with bit parts in Hollywood blockbuster films All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle, quickly skyrocketing to stardom.

Monroe saw a 1952 story on Marlene Dietrich in Esquire and fell in love with photographer Eve Arnold’s extraordinary gift for portraiture. They soon met at a party, and Monroe made her move, stroking the photographer’s imagination with her signature blend of innocence and sin: “If you could do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?”

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The actress and photographer collaborated on six photo shoots over the course of a decade, until Monroe’s untimely passing in 1962. Her death sparked a media feeding frenzy. In response Arnold kept all but a few images from their decade together locked in the vault.

But in 1987, on the 25th anniversary of Monroe’s death, Arnold decided the time had come to revisit their extraordinary collaboration with a monograph that revealed the complex psyche of the Hollywood icon. Now the book is back in print as Marilyn Monroe By Eve Arnold (ACC Art Books), with a new introduction by Michael Arnold, Eve’s grandson and one of the trustees of the Arnold estate and archive.

“I never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera,” Eve Arnold wrote in 1987. “She was special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have— unconsciously—judged other subjects.”

Arnold intuitively understood Monroe: an ambitious woman who could be at once overflowing and withholding, transparent and opaque, creating an air of intimacy and mystery with an allure that seemingly never fades. She was just the photographer to chronicle a woman who was often portrayed by the mainstream media as a temperamental bimbo.

”Eve Arnold had a natural curiosity about people and she was an amazing listener,” says Michael Arnold. “She had this integrity, presence, and nonjudgmentalness. You knew that you could trust her with what was real for you.”

In Monroe, Arnold saw a woman who created a glittering public figure, one that won the love and adulation she never found at home. In Arnold, Monroe had a collaborator who didn’t need to be seduced or coddled, and could simply be as she was.

During their final encounter on the set of The Misfits, Monroe was in a fragile state, and asked if Arnold could stay on longer. A two-week assignment stretched into two months, the women bonded in their daily collaboration on set.

“Eve was one of the few people that Marilyn could turn to and confide in, and she wanted to show some of that vulnerability in the photographs,” Michael Arnold says. “At the time, Hollywood photography was very idealized and glamorous, and Eve wanted to do something different — to show who women are, as people.”

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