Lawrence Schiller
Galerie f5,6, Munich, Germany is proud to announce an exhibition by American Lawrence Schiller of his legendary Marilyn Monroe portfolio, accompanied by other historic images of the 60's. Lawrence Schiller was one of the most important magazine photographers in the 60's working for Magazines such as Stern, Paris Match, Life Magazine , Time, Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post.
And through this turbulent and tumultuous decade, it often seemed that whenever a headline-making news event occurred, Lawrence Schiller, like Woody Allen's fictional Zelig, was there. When the 1960 presidential election results came in and Richard Nixon lost, Schiller was there to capture Nixon's wife's tears And when Marilyn Monroe took off her clothes in 1962, Schiller photographed her . When Lee Harvey Oswald was captured after the assassination of JFK, , and two days later killed by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police department in 1963, Schiller was covering it for The Saturday
Evening Post. When Muhammad Ali knocked out Floyd Patterson Schiller was
there. He portrayed many Hollywood stars like Paul Newman and Robert
Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, Dennis Hopper, Barbara
Streisand to name but a few.
His early career as a photographer already culminated in the early 60's when he photographed the now legendary images of Marilyn Monroe on the set of what would be her 30th and last film Something got to give in 1962. Two months after celebrating her birthday on set, captured by Schiller, Marilyn died. In 2007 this portfolio was shown for the first time in galleries and museums worldwide. It has been receiving enourmous International press attention.
The world was unprepared for the moment when Marilyn jumped in the swimming pool in a flesh-colored bikini and came up out of the water au natural. She was all smiles and in her element: the sex goddess, posing for eternity. What we do know is that she welcomed Schiller's camera, and once again in the photographer's life, he was in the right place at the right time. Schiller and Marilyn had a relationship based on friendship. This allowed him to capture a very private Marilyn in all her facettes, which makes this portfolio so extraordinary.
„Marilyn was insecure and shy. When the cameras would roll, whether it was a still camera or a movie camera, she'd come alive. She was really an actress. The "dumb blonde" image was just a total performance. She could turn it on and she could turn it off. I remember once I was walking with her from the parking lot to the dressing room. She had on this big black and white cardigan sweater. Her voice was very quiet and we were just talking about what she was going to do that afternoon. A couple guys came around the corner, walking in the opposite direction towards her. And all of a sudden she became Marilyn Monroe, the dumb blonde. Her shoulders changed, her face changed. When they walked by, she turned her head over her shoulder and flashed that coquettish smile of hers—she was playing to them because she knew they wanted to see "Marilyn Monroe." But in real life, Marilyn wasn't that sexy dumb blonde you saw in movies. She was a professional businesswoman, she knew what it was about; she'd been run over by enough trucks in her life and survived" (Lawrence Schiller in an interview with Lawrence Grobel)
By the end of '60s Lawrence Schiller had covered so many stories, had so many magazine covers, that he had somehow become part of that decade's history. „And I already had my eye on the future" he recalls."
That future would include five collaborations with Norman Mailer. For The Executioner's Song, they received the Pulitzer Prize. Schiller's own works, such as American Tragedy, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town and Cape May Court House all became New York Times number one best sellers. Schiller would also produce and/or direct sixteen television and feature films and miniseries, the films winning six Emmys and one Academy Award.
