Collection: Marilyn Monroe: New York 1955 - The Ed Feingersh Collection

Getty Images Gallery is pleased to mark Marilyn Monroe’s centenary with the addition of seven portraits by Ed Feingersh to our catalogue. The newly added images expand our existing offering of portraits made by Feingersh while on assignment for Redbook magazine in 1955. This series of candid portraits was made at a pivotal moment in Monroe’s life and career; she had recently founded her own production in response to a rocky and unfair business relationship with 20th Century Fox and relocated to Manhattan to study acting under Lee and Paula Strasberg. She had also begun psychoanalysis, and all while undergoing a very public divorce from Joe DiMaggio.

Feingersh, a trained photojournalist who studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch, was given complete access to the actress from March 24 to 30. Monroe and her business partner, the photographer Milton Greene, had personally recommended Feingersh for the shoot, his first for the magazine. The easy-going relationship between the megastar and unassuming photojournalist produced some of the most vulnerable and revered portraits of Monroe’s career. Notably, they were the only candid photographs she approved for publication before her untimely death.

Feingersh hung up his camera in 1957 and died four years later. In 1987, Michael Ochs located several rolls of abandoned negatives from the shoot in a Brooklyn warehouse. Those negatives now sit under the Getty Images Archive and produced the frames seen here.