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\n\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Can you tell me a little about de Dienes\u2019 career as a photographer?<\/strong><\/p>\n De Dienes worked in Paris for a while on a communist newspaper, and then for the Associated Press until the mid thirties. And then around that time a Parisian fashion designer saw de Dienes\u2019 work and suggested that he perhaps move into the realm of fashion photography.<\/p>\n In the late thirties he was offered a position at Esquire in New York City. He worked for Life Magazine, Esquire, Vogue, and decided to move to California in 1944, and that\u2019s when he really began to specialise in nudes, some of which will be in the exhibition. He was also quite a well-known fixture in the Hollywood scene in the 1940\u2019s\/ 1950\u2019s.<\/p>\n Can you tell me about his ethos as a photographer and his interest in focusing on fashion and then nudes for much of his career?<\/strong><\/p>\n He just had a sense for aesthetics and he was really attracted to things that were beautiful, whether it was the natural world, a landscape, a couture gown that he was shooting for Vogue, or a beautiful model \u2013 he was inspired for a lot of his California work by the work of Edward and Brett Weston, so he was interested in integrating these beautiful women into this beautiful landscape, and I think that\u2019s where some of the experimental nude photography began.<\/p>\n How did he and Marilyn first meet?<\/strong><\/p>\n They met in 1945 when he was looking to start photographing some of his artistic nudes, and he reached out to a couple of different model agencies looking for nude models, and one of them, the Blue Book model agency, said, \u201cWe\u2019ve got this girl in my office really eager to get her start and she won\u2019t leave me alone. We\u2019re sending her to you,\u201d and the way he describes it in his memoir he calls her a miracle, he calls her a sexy looking angel, sent just for him.<\/p>\n He became immediately obsessed and fascinated with her, decided that she was much too innocent and pure to take any nudes but he took her on a 5 week long vacation into the mountains, where they became very close, they actually returned from this trip engaged very briefly.<\/p>\n But then he went back to New York for a time and their engagement broke off, but they remained very close friends for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n How pivotal, if at all, were his images in helping Marilyn establish herself in Hollywood?<\/strong><\/p>\n I would say that the series of pinup shots, which we\u2019re including in the exhibition that he shot in New York and Long Island, were some of the first well-known photographs of Marilyn.<\/p>\n She really started to become a more household name after that. It wasn\u2019t until just after those photographs, around 1946, she had just changed her name from Norma Jean Baker, to Marilyn Monroe and that was just after that series of pinup shots had gone out to the market really. And that was when she started to transition from a model into an actress.<\/p>\n What makes de Dienes photographs of Marilyn notable from all the ones that were taken of her during her lifetime?<\/strong><\/p>\n Every time they would meet, she would essentially send everyone else away, she would send away her dresser, she would send away her makeup artist, she would send away her wardrobe people, all of her handlers, and it would just be the two of them, so of all of the photographs of Marilyn the images that de Dienes captured of her are some I think of the purest, they show her at her most true self.<\/p>\n What’s most interesting is that they are some of the earliest. He essentially discovered her, so although photographers like Douglas Kirkland and Milton Green shot some very famous series – some of which are also quite uncommon – they are also later, from the 50s, so the photographs that we have in her exhibition of the very early 1945 era are very rare.<\/p>\n You really don\u2019t see photos of her at that age. Once she was renamed Marilyn Monroe, the studio sort of rebranded her. They chopped off her hair, dyed it blonde and started dressing her in a certain fashion. They were trying to market her as a sexpot so didn\u2019t really want those older, more farm-girl-style pin-up photographs of her looking quite innocent to come out. Which is what you see in a lot of the early photographs by Andre.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t actually photograph her again until 1952 outside where she was staying at the Bel Air Hotel. And in that series of photographs she looks quite distressed.<\/p>\n She called him in the middle of the night, they went out into an alley behind the Bel Air Hotel and he shot her with no make-up, almost in tears. About that time there was a lot of negativity around her. The studios were taking advantage of her. A lot of people say that they were feeding her drugs, so she was really going through a difficult time.<\/p>\n I think the interesting thing about Andre\u2019s work is that you really see the transition. You see this innocent young girl looking to get into the movie business and then it jumps to these very forlorn-looking shots of her after she\u2019s been ridden hard by the system and taken advantage of and you get to see both sides of it, the very very beginning and then the beginning of the end.<\/p>\n\n Can you tell us about this exhibition in particular? <\/strong><\/p>\n A large part of the exhibition is made up of the early photographs from Tobay beach and Long Island, some of those very early pinup photographs and we have lifetime prints from the 1952 shoot outside the Bell Air Hotel and a few other shoots as well.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a shoot in New York where they\u2019re in her apartment and he photographed her engaged in her daily routine \u2013 reading a script, taking a bath, eating a carrot – it\u2019s very quaint and she appears much happier in those photographs. He shot her throughout her life, but the shoots were often years apart, so we have examples from almost all of their shoots together.<\/p>\n\n![\"ADD113\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/ADD113.jpg\")
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