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Photographs by Sam and Larry Shaw Marilyn & Friends
[Susan Glasspool]
In his Mythologies of 1957 Roland Barthes wrote that, in his opinion, myths were a language and tend to become a form of communication or message, classifying Greta Garbo as conceptual and Audrey Hepburn as substantial. “Garbo’s face is an Idea, while Hepburn’s is an Event.”
Marilyn Monroe’s tragic end led to her transformation from an Event to an Idea. When she was alive, Norma Jean Baker’s stage name represented a patriotic yet dangerously attractive and evasive kind of woman, seductive for some and wicked for others. This exhibition shows her under a much more familiar and ordinary aspect and never as the victim of her personality. Even so, the mystery that was to make her sublime, a symbol and icon of the 20th century, was already present in her spontaneously natural character, which was to cast its spell throughout the world.
The show includes 155 pictures of the famous film star, the myth and icon of the 20th century, her friends and contemporary actors. The photographs, most of them on display for the first time, include 40 large blow-ups in colour. Sam Shaw, a “New Yorker from East Side” as he called himself, and his son Larry are the authors of the photos. Shaw (1912-1999), painter, sculptor and photographer, also carried out covers for the Life and Look magazines. His first success in the cinema came with his sensational portrait of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar named desire (1951). After photographing Marilyn Monroe in her first film, Viva Zapata, Shaw was never to abandon her again, carrying out the famous sequence of her skirt being blown up by hot air in Billy Wilder ‘s The Seven Year Itch in 1955. Over the years, Shaw carried out other portraits of Marilyn, many unpublished, unlike his great advertising posters with other actors like Paul Newman and Sydney Poitier and stars like Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani and Liz Taylor. Shaw worked in close collaboration with his son Larry (1937), who was also assistant to other great photographers like Martin Munkacsi, Louis Faurer and Bert Stern.
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