Marilyn (Taschen Limited Deluxe Edition)

DE DIENES, André (ed. Steve Crist; with Shirley T. Ellis de Dienes). Marilyn. Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 2002. 3 vols.

Elephant Folio. Three-volume set housed in a large yellow facsimile Kodak photographic paper box, with book title, photographer, and publisher written in black ink over crossed-out Kodak labels — precisely as de Dienes's own boxes were inscribed. Contents: (1) oversized hardcover, 240 pp., photographs throughout in colour and black and white, printed on 150g matte stock, with excerpts from de Dienes's memoirs; (2) softcover facsimile of de Dienes's complete Marilyn memoirs and Marilyn composite book, 608 pp., comprising the complete set of nearly 1,000 Marilyn photographs in contact-sized prints; (3) facsimile brochure comprising all 24 of Marilyn's magazine covers shot by de Dienes and a facsimile of the Sunbathing Review (Fall 1958). First edition. Limited to 20,000 numbered copies. Set unopened.

The story of Monroe's coming-of-age is extraordinary: from a succession of foster families, an early marriage to a factory worker, a discovery by a photographer for a munitions company catalogue, to a position at the absolute centre of twentieth-century popular culture. This is the book about the photographer who found her before she was famous and photographed her for the rest of her life.

André de Dienes (1913–1985) was born in Transylvania and had established himself in New York as a successful magazine photographer by the time he came to Los Angeles in the autumn of 1945. At a modelling agency he was introduced to a nineteen-year-old named Norma Jeane Dougherty, estranged from her first husband and working occasionally as a model. He asked her if she wanted to come on a road trip to be photographed in the natural light of the American West. She said yes. They drove north through Oregon and Washington and east to the desert and the national parks, de Dienes shooting through hundreds of rolls of film as he went, and by the time they returned he had proposed and she had declined — but they remained, in his account, in love and in each other's orbit for the rest of their lives.

De Dienes photographed Norma Jeane and then Marilyn Monroe from 1945 to 1961, accumulating an archive of extraordinary breadth and intimacy: images that precede the studio machinery of 20th Century Fox, that show a woman who has not yet become an icon, whose beauty is unstudied and whose relationship with the camera is one of genuine pleasure rather than professional performance. The archive sat in storage for seventeen years after de Dienes's death in 1985, tended by his wife Shirley T. Ellis de Dienes, before Taschen's Steve Crist brought it to publication in 2002. The vast majority of the colour photographs had never been seen before.

The production Taschen devised for the archive is commensurate with the material. The oversized main volume reproduces the finest photographs at a scale that gives them the visual presence they deserve — Monroe on a beach, in a meadow, in a swimming pool, in the desert light of the American Southwest, always in the outdoor settings de Dienes preferred — alongside excerpts from the photographer's memoirs that give the images a biographical frame. The 608-page softcover facsimile of de Dienes's complete Marilyn archive in contact-print form gives collectors and researchers access to a resource of remarkable completeness. And the Kodak box itselfplaces the entire set in the context of de Dienes's working life: the box is the same kind of box his negatives lived in.

Unopened. Box and contents remain in publisher's shrinkwrap.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000615