Last October 2, four days after the premiere of the film BlondePhotographer Douglas Kirkland, who gained notoriety in the 1960s for his erotic photos of Marilyn Monroe, has died. The famous images of the sheets and pillows. He was 88 years old.
He was then a young photographer at the beginning of his career, although he was already working for the robust magazine lookswhich opened doors for Marilyn.
In late 1961, the magazine sent Kirkland to Los Angeles to photograph the actress. They met at her house, where she told him what she wanted for the session: a white silk sheet, Frank Sinatra records, and Dom Perignon champagne.
When they met in a studio four days later, she took off her robe and got into bed, wrapped a sheet around her and posed for Kirkland. At one point in the shoot, the photographer climbed onto a balcony above her and took a set of photos from a vertical perspective.
Years later, Kirkland was to recall that the actress looked like she was directing herself and seemed cheerful. She hugged the pillow, hid everything but her face in the sheet, and turned her back to the camera.
“Technically I had it all right,” Kirkland said in an interview with CBS This Morning in 2012. “My [cámara] Hasselblad [hizo] click click clickbut it was Marilyn Monroe who actually created these images.”
The photographer recalled that session in the 2020 documentary That Click: The Legendary Photograph of Douglas Kirkland, directed by Luca Severi: “What the pillow represents is what you would like to do to a man, and I could have been there and been the pillow. But I chose to continue taking pictures, because that’s really what Douglas Kirkland is like, in a nutshell.”
In the end, the magazine looks used only one of Monroe’s photographs inside the magazine, but Kirkland collected many in a 2012 book, With Marilyn: An Evening/1961. His other photo books include light years: three decades of photography among the stars (1989), icons (1993) and legends (1999), recalled today, Tuesday, the newspaper New York Times in writing the obituary of the photographer.
Kirkland’s work was not the only one in terms of erotic images of the actress. In fact, it opened the doors to many others, such as the images taken by Richard Avedon. The Kirkland archive is in the public domain after looks deliver it to the National Archives when the magazine closes.
