More about Bert Stern

Works by Bert Stern

Emily Browne

Contributor

Though many have come before him and many will come after him, Bert Stern has stood out as one of the most prominent male gazers in all of art history.

I mean the list of women he has looked at is incredible - Marilyn Monroe, Twiggy, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn...the list goes on. His eyes should be in some sort of hall of fame for how good at looking at women he is.

Born in  Brooklyn in 1929, Stern always knew he wanted to be an artist, but his dad told him that he should probably be a banker instead, what with the Great Depression and everything. So Stern compromised and got a job in the mailroom of Look magazine where he became buds with Stanley Kubrick. From there he got an opportunity to do an ad for Smirnoff Vodka. He decided that he was going to fill a martini glass with vodka and set it in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt so that the image of the pyramid would be inverted in the glass. This turned out brilliantly and from there his career took off as an art director.

Soon he was taking pictures of something he was incredibly passionate about: women. Something new and different for men! And shockingly enough, he had affairs with a lot of these women. First was Teddy. He got engaged to her because he wanted to have sex with her. But then Dorothy came along and told him to leave Teddy so he did. Then Dorothy pulled a knife on him because she couldn’t handle his cheating. Then there was the great love of his life Allegra Kent, a ballet dancer. She was the mother of his three children, but things went awry when Bert got into amphetamines. He went a little psycho so Allegra took the children and bailed. She also just didn’t really love him that much and referred to him as her sperm donor, which is way harsh. Last of all, there was Bert’s “white buffalo”- Marilyn Monroe. He took a series of sexy pictures of her called The Last Sitting because she died six weeks after they were taken. He loved her almost as much as Allegra but he never got to sleep with her so that was that.

Stern was always an incredibly camera-shy man. He never liked being in front of the camera. But his last lover, Shannah Laumeister convinced him to do a documentary about his life, which he was really grumpy about but cooperated with. His legacy consists of his beautiful photos of beautiful women and popularizing Smirnoff in the United States, for which college freshman across the nation are eternally grateful.

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Bert Stern

Biography
Stern was the son of Jewish immigrants and grew up in Brooklyn. His father worked as a children’s portrait photographer. After dropping out of high school at the age of 16, he gained a job in the mail room at Look magazine. He became art director at Flair magazine, where he learned how to develop film and make contact sheets and began taking his own pictures. In 1951, Stern was drafted into the United States Army, sent to Japan, and assigned to the photographic department.
He rose to prominence in the 1950s as a commercial and fashion photographer, known for innovative advertising work (including a celebrated Smirnoff campaign) and portraits of celebrities. In June and July 1962 he photographed Marilyn Monroe for Vogue in sessions that became known as The Last Sitting. Monroe died in August 1962; the 2,571 photographs from those sessions were later published (including in The Complete Last Sitting, 1992 / expanded editions).
In the 1960s his heavy use of amphetamines contributed to the end of his marriage to ballerina Allegra Kent. In the 1970s Stern moved to Spain to recover from drug addiction. By the late 1970s he returned to the United States and resumed portrait and fashion photography. In 1979 he published The Pill Book (with journalist Lawrence Chilnick), an A-to-Z guide to commonly prescribed drugs that sold millions of copies and featured color photographs of the pills by Stern.
Stern continued working in later decades. He was the subject of the 2011 documentary Bert Stern: Original Madman, directed by filmmaker and actress Shannah Laumeister.
Personal life
Stern’s first marriage was to model Teddy Ayer (also referred to in some sources as Eleanor Fay Mostel / Teddy Air).
He married New York City Ballet principal dancer Allegra Kent in 1959. They had three children—daughters Trista and Susannah and son Bret—and divorced in 1975.
In 2009 Stern married Shannah Laumeister (later Shannah Laumeister Stern), an actress, screenwriter, and film director who had long been associated with him as a muse and model (he first photographed her in the early 1980s). The marriage was kept private. Laumeister directed the documentary Bert Stern: Original Madman (2011). Stern died at his home in New York City on June 26, 2013, at age 83; his death was confirmed by his wife Shannah Laumeister Stern. He was also survived by his three children from his marriage to Allegra Kent, a sister, and grandchildren.
Filmography

Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959) – concert film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, directed by Bert Stern and Aram Avakian.

References

“Bert Stern et ses muses.” Vanity Fair (French), June 26, 2014 (archived).
Vitello, Paul. “Bert Stern, Elite Photographer Known for Images of Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 83.” The New York Times, June 26, 2013, p. B17.
“Bert Stern.” The Telegraph, June 27, 2013.
“Bert Stern: Photographer who became best known for the ‘Last Sitting’.” The Independent, July 2013.
Additional contemporary obituaries and reports (including Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and others) confirming the 2009 marriage to Shannah Laumeister and her role in confirming his death and directing the 2011 documentary.



External links

Bert Stern at IMDb
Bert Stern at FMD (Fashion Model Directory)

Check out the full Wikipedia article about Bert Stern