Bert Stern

Bert Stern (1929-2013) was one of the more influential American photographers of the twentieth century, whose fashion photography, celebrity portraits, and iconic advertising imagery helped define the visual culture of postwar America. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants, Stern was first exposed to photography at a young age by his father, who worked as a children's portrait photographer. Dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen, Stern took a mailroom job at Look magazine, where he soon became a protégé of the art director, a connection that would later lead him to his first job as a commercial photographer.

As art director at Flair magazine, Stern learned to develop film and make contact sheets, mastering the technical foundations of the medium he would come to shape. During the Korean War, he served in the United States Army, assigned to the photographic department in Japan, an experience that gave him further professional practice under demanding conditions. In the 1950s and 1960s in New York, alongside Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Mark Shaw, Stern helped redefine the role of the image in fashion and advertising, infusing simple commercial photography with an artistic sensibility that had rarely been brought to bear on such work before.

Stern's breakthrough came in 1955 with his celebrated advertising campaign for Smirnoff vodka. His now-legendary photograph of a martini glass positioned before the pyramids at Giza became one of the most famous advertising images of the century and effectively launched a new era in American commercial photography. He is best remembered today for The Last Sitting, his celebrated series of nearly 2,500 photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken over three days at the Bel Air Hotel in June 1962, just six weeks before her death. These intimate images, produced for Vogue magazine, remain among the most affecting photographic portraits ever made of the actress. He photographed countless other cultural figures throughout his career, including Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Twiggy, and Sophia Loren.

Stern also directed the celebrated 1959 documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day, filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival, which stands as one of the finest concert films ever made. His photographs are held today in major museum collections, and his images continue to circulate as some of the defining pictures of postwar American culture.