Marilyn. Portrait d’une enfant radieuse

Marilyn’s white skirt corolla lifted by the draught from the subway grate, at the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue… Invited by Billy Wilder to the set of Seven Year Itch in 1954, Sam Shaw got as close as possible to what was unfolding. As close as possible to the flesh, bathed in a clarity as radiant as that of the stars whose scintillation continues to reach us, even though they have long since died out. What more can be said about Marilyn Monroe that hasn’t already been written, told, rehashed?

Too many words, too many clichés, too many prints endlessly reproduced, commented on ad nauseam. 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. Of the intensity of a life. Of her beauty. And of her vulnerability. , when Sam Shaw began working for various studios in the film industry.

They became friends. In some respects, they were comrades in arms. ” – the photographer undeniably contributed to Marilyn’s performance. She felt confident under Shaw’s gaze.

Fully immersed in the fervour of her nascent love affair with the writer Arthur Miller, her third husband, she no longer wore her heart on her sleeve.

The photographs gathered between these pages are all radiant images: Marilyn in the studio in the title role of Marilyn – ruby red lips, candy floss blonde curls… Of all the shots collected in this small anthology, those taken in Roxbury, Miller’s property in Connecticut, are unforgettable.

Nothing spectacular, incidentally. Moments of happy intimacy. But Shaw’s gaze has never been so tactile, making us feel the creamy paleness of that fresh milk skin, penetrating the halo of softness and abandonment of that face left to itself.

On the back of one of the prints where the couple is leaning against a tree, Marilyn had noted: “Films are my business, but Arthur is my life” – Or so. The boundary is labile, porous for one who exposes herself, to the point of vertigo, to the art of doubling.

The images of Marilyn at her dressing table, engaged in the ritual ceremony of make-up, offer a troubling mise en abyme where both the distance and the proximity between her and the Other are revealed. Norma Jean knew better than anyone