The innocence and the fire thatwas Marily Monroe are captured forever in the most ravishing photographs ever taken of the legendary star. Bert Stern, famed photographer of beautiful women, had a dream.

The Last Sitting

Arts & Photography

Bert Stern

Photography & Video

Black Cat.

Text with Anne Gottlieb. Photographs by Bert Stern . 4to pp. 192 Rilegato tela, sovracoperta (cloth, dust jacket) Molto Buono (Very Good)

Last Sitting

Biographies & Memoirs

Orbis Pub.

Steerage was the place deep in the hold, well below deck, windowless, where, for centuries, they put cattle that had to be carried across the ocean. When the great waves of migration came to the U.S., the thousands of dirt-poor peasants rode there as well. Down there, asks Bert Stern s ancestor in the title poem of Steerage, Who knew where to go to the toilet, if there would be water? In a corner, on blankets, we made house. The crowding, the noise, the smells of stale seawater and p..s, / animals and human sweat, made the gorge rise. One woman called it Gehenna, hell, but they all went down into the hold anyway and most of them made it to America. That s where this remarkable book of poems starts, with such memory as Stern can piece together, or imagine, of what brought his ancestors, driven out of Russia by pogrom, to a life in Buffalo. All suffered to bring me here to this room where I write, bigger than the house my mother was born in. I am somebody s dream. Let them/ tell me if they can . . . if I am recompense for what they endured. Steerage also plays on the verb, to steer, to guide. This is the defining act of these poems. In the long absence of those who suffered to bring me here, late in life, with death almost a friendly companion, the poet moves gingerly but expertly between his fears and longings, between then and now. Myself, he says in Blackberries, I don t go back much further than last Tuesday s two a.m., but I smell my elders almost benign around me, and I eat the berries they send forth as seed. More than anything else, Bert Stern s poems find a way to wear the great heaviness of life with a charitable lightness. In a rare comic moment, a rabbi approaches the speaker asking for a donation to SPEJS, the Society for the Permanent Elimination of Jewish Suffering. I gave already at the office, says the speaker. What office? I can t explain. . . . It s outside history. Only God is outside history, says the rabbi, but wanting proof anyway, he takes off his black coat and fake beard and slips them over the speaker. You can show me now, says the rabbi trickster. Stern, too, emerges as his own self-made rabbi (in a long tradition, it would seem), oracle or exegete of that sacred place outside history where the dead go and the dying long for. One of the most moving poems of this collection, Wait, placed next to last, tells of Jacob who sat by a girl, a girl who was dying in his heart, the soul you might say of Jacob himself, to whom he says, Wait . . . Listen. He knew a thin song that birds steer by. And Jacob sings it slowly, easing the girl, himself, the girl and (or as) himself, out of the world by recalling it. God is sleeping but He is coming. Now. Wait. Remember a leaf. Remember the turnip s sweet spheroid, its little tail. Say how stars live, burning. How the stony icicles of this grotto live, drip, drip, as if breathing. Fire and ice. And, yet, as he says in Testament, Even now children are being born. Or, in White-Throated Sparrow : Always a white-throated sparrow singing on a mountaintop, and somebody there listening to it for the first time. That's what you need to believe . . . The survival manuals don t tell us how to survive life itself, the harness of daily living, the distance between ourselves and what we hope for. This is why Steerage is a book to cherish. Roger Mitchell

Steerage

Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, Mass.

1998 cloth bound hardcover- pictorial book of Marilyn Monroe's last sitting - translated from the German by Michael Robertson.

Marilyn Monroe's Last Sitting

Individual Artists

Schirmer/Mosel Verlag Gmbh

S 5 Hardcover with DJ. ISBN: 0316907626. Book & DJ NEW. No marks, names or other damage. Revealing Marilyn Monroe. Includes photographs from last sitting & photos from Stern's private collection, never before printed. Color & black & white. Dust jacket has very little wear it has a photograph of Monroe on bed. Corners, binding & spine are tight.

Bert Stern / Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting 
Bert Stern, the famous commercial and fashion photographer of the 60s, was the last to be granted a sitting by Marilyn Monroe six weeks before her tragic death. The three-day session yielded nearly 2,600 picturesfashion, portrait, and nude studiesof indescribable sensual and human vibrancy, of which no more than 20 were published. And yet these few photographs ineradicably shaped our image of Marilyn Monroe. This book presents the complete set of 2,571 photos. The monumental body of work by the master photographer and the Hollywood actress marks a climax in the history of star photography, both in quantity and quality. It is a unique affirmation of the erotic dimension of photography and the eroticism of taking photos, and it is the world's finest and largest tribute to Marilyn Monroe. 
Text by Bert Stern

Marilyn Monroe: The Last Sitting

Humor & Entertainment

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Books by Bert Stern

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bert Stern. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Last Sitting

Last Sitting

Steerage

Marilyn Monroe's Last Sitting

The Last Sitting

Marilyn Monroe: The Last Sitting