[Dixielandjazz] Bert Stern-- photographer who photographed "Jazz on a Summer's Day" dies at 83; NYTimes 6-26-2013

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML and musicians and Jazzfans list

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Today’s NYTimes carries the obituary  of photographer Bert Stern.  I wasn’t
familiar with him by name, but since he was photographer who was involved
with “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” it’s worth noting on these two lists.  Also,
note that he was Marilyn Monroe’s photographer as well.

 

Bassist Steve Gilmore, longtime with Phil Woods’ group and others, and I
were talking recently about pianist  Jimmy Rowles.  He related that Jimmy
was pianist assigned to Ms. Monroe by the Hollywood studio.  Rowles was “on
call” and sometimes would get phone call in the middle of the night to come
when Ms. Monroe decided she wanted to rehearse some songs.  One incident
related to call he got in the middle of the night.  When Rowles got there,
Ms. Monroe was in the bathtub.  Piano was in next room—so he played while
she sang.

I guess this is a variation of “singing in the shower.”

 

Also, our listmate, clarinetist  Brad Terry from Bath, ME was pictured in
the “Jazz on a Summer’s Day.”  He has reminded us, “I’m the guy with the
straw hat!”

 

Too bad that we only learn some of these good things when reading the
person’s obit.

 

 

 




  _____  

New York Times   June 26, 2013


Bert Stern, Elite Photographer Known for Images of Marilyn Monroe, Dies at
83


By PAUL VITELLO
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/v/paul_vitello/i
ndex.html> 


Bert Stern, an elite commercial photographer who helped redefine advertising
and fashion art in the 1950s and ’60s but is perhaps best known for his
painfully raw and poignant photos of Marilyn Monroe, taken for Vogue six
weeks before her death, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.


His death was confirmed by Shannah Laumeister, a longtime friend, who said
she and Mr. Stern had been secretly married since 2009. No cause was given. 

Mr. Stern’s half-century career had multiple peaks, including
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMLtnskACQg> “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” his
1959 documentary film about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, which was
selected in 1999 for the National Film Registry in recognition of its
historical significance. 

His photographs of Monroe, taken over three days in June 1962 in the Hotel
Bel-Air in Los Angeles, were collected in a mammoth 2000 book, “Marilyn
Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting.” 

“It was a one-time-in-a-lifetime experience, to have Marilyn Monroe in a
hotel room,” Mr. Stern said in the 2010 documentary
<http://www.bertsternmadman.com/> “Bert Stern: Original Madman,” “even
though it was turned into a studio, where I could do anything I wanted.” Ms.
Laumeister directed the film. 

Many of the photos showed Monroe unclothed, or posing behind transparent
scarves. “She was so beautiful at that time,” Mr. Stern told Newsday. “I
didn’t say, ‘Pose nude.’ It was more one thing leading to another: You take
clothes off and off and off and off and off. She thought for a while. I’d
say something and the pose just led to itself.” 

Early in his career Mr. Stern made his mark with a 1955 close-up of a
martini in the Egyptian desert, pyramid shimmering in the background. The
picture, which he shot on location with a crew of technicians and models for
a Smirnoff vodka advertisement, was considered groundbreaking in its
simplicity. 

Along with Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Mark Shaw, Mr. Stern was part of
a generation of photographers who made clear, clutter-free, arresting images
the language of glossy magazine advertising, which until then had mainly
used pictures to illustrate text. 

In the program notes for a 1988 Manhattan gallery exhibition, Robert
Sobieszek, the curator of what is now the International Museum of
Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, called Mr. Stern’s martini
photograph “the most influential break with traditional advertising
photography” of its time. 

In a statement considered provocative in its day, Mr. Stern told a panel of
commercial artists in 1959, “I like to put my feelings into my photographs.”


That same year he received an assignment that took some effort to connect
with his feelings: the makers of Spam asked him to “romanticize shish kebab
made from Spam,” he told The New York Times. Mr. Stern took a crew of
helpers and models to the Gulf of Mexico to shoot that one — a dreamy shot
of that meat product. The client was pleased. 

Bert Stern was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 3, 1929. In a 1968 interview with
Newsday, he said his father was a children’s portrait photographer. After
dropping out of high school in his senior year, he served in the Army,
working as a photographer on a base in Japan. 

That experience helped him land a job in the mailroom at Look magazine,
where he became a protégé of Hershel Bramson, the art director, who would
later give him his first job as a commercial photographer. The Smirnoff
campaign was his first assignment. 

Soon he was sought after by magazines, advertisers, Hollywood studios and
fashion designers, and his range of subjects grew to include celebrities,
movie stars and commercial products — Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Truman
Capote, Twiggy, Elizabeth Taylor, Noxema skin cream, One a Day vitamins,
Wish-Bone salad dressing and, of course, Marilyn Monroe. 

In addition to Ms. Laumeister, Mr. Stern is survived by two daughters,
Trista and Susannah; a son, Bret; a sister, Diane Schlanger; and three
grandchildren. His marriage to the dancer Allegra Kent, the mother of his
children, ended in divorce in 1975. 

Mr. Stern’s work is in many museum collections, including those of the
Museum of Modern Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York,
and the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y.. 

In various interviews Mr. Stern said taking pictures had always been his way
of seeing people, and even of relating to them in ways he could not
otherwise. 

It was why his favorite subject was always professional models. “Models more
than actresses,” he said. “What makes a great model is her need, her desire;
and it’s exciting to photograph desire.”