Marilyn Monroe through the female gaze

Marilyn Monroe reads "Ulysses" in a Long Island park. Eve Arnold Estate/Courtesy National Portrait Gallery via CNN Newsource

The world’s most famous blonde bombshell, perched on playground equipment, absorbed in a book. The studio make-up and lighting is gone; as are her shoes. It’s 1955 and a summery glow radiates from her exposed limbs.

The photo is playful — she wears a multi-colored romper in a children’s setting. And simultaneously, serious. The book heavy in her arms is James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” a notoriously hard-going novel. She’s almost finished it.

The woman, of course, is a 29-year-old Marilyn Monroe, captured by American photojournalist Eve Arnold in Long Island, New York. Through Arnold’s lens, the Hollywood icon is quiet, contemplative and natural. Is Monroe aware of the camera? That’s up for debate.

The photo is part of the National Portrait Gallery in London’s new exhibition exploring Monroe’s agency in her own image-making. Opening Thursday, it features dozens of portraits — from the earliest pinups of an all-American gal called Norma Jeane, who would have turned 100 this month, to her last photoshoot on the Santa Monica beach, taken weeks before her death in 1962, aged 36.

Arnold’s photo tells a lesser-known story of Monroe; an avid reader who had a personal library of more than 400 books spanning poetry, plays, philosophy and dense literature like “Ulysses.” And no, the book wasn’t a prop, said Michael Arnold, grandson of the photographer who died in 2012. “Eve was just setting up her cameras, and she saw that Monroe got it out and was reading it, waiting for her to get ready,” he said during a phone call.

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Look closer, and Monroe is on the last pages — where the protagonist’s wife in the novel, Molly Bloom, explores female sexuality in an unpunctuated stream of consciousness. “With her choice to be seen reading the end of ‘Ulysses,’ Monroe was clearly making a knowing point,” wrote leading feminist art historian Griselda Pollock in her 2016 essay on the photo, published in the Journal of Visual Culture. It was “an identification perhaps at so many levels with the words, the spoken words of an uneducated woman, allowed to have an inner and a sexual life, and to have the final say,” added Pollock.

Monroe’s image-making

Monroe always had greater agency over her still images than her moving images, which were largely determined by the film studios and directors. “With photography, I think she felt she was more in control,” said Georgia Atienza, assistant curator of the Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. She pointed to the actor’s veto powers over her photographs, and the way she would go through contact sheets sometimes scratching with a hairpin the images she didn’t want published. “There’s this very conscious idea from her of controlling her image and getting out there the images that she was really happy with,” said Atienza.

In Arnold, Monroe saw a photographer who could help visualize her shift from sex symbol to serious artist. The Long Island snap was taken months after Monroe had left Hollywood to start her own film company; she first became aware of the photojournalist years earlier.

In 1952, Arnold had photographed actress and singer Marlene Dietrich in the recording studio, using her signature natural style — no set, posing or tripod. “I simply took her as she was,” Arnold recalled in a 1987 BBC documentary. The Dietrich photos caught the eye of Monroe, who saw Arnold at a party and told her: “If you can do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?” Arnold remembered.

The pair worked together on several photoshoots over a decade, including on the film set of the “The Misfits” in 1960; an emotionally fraught time for Monroe whose marriage to screenwriter Arthur Miller was in strife, and who found solace in Arnold’s presence.

Arnold, who saw herself as a serious photojournalist, was initially reluctant to work with the Hollywood star, said Michael. “But I think there was something kind of magnetic about her that she kept coming back to.” The women bonded over being relatively early in their careers, said Michael, adding that they “learned to play together and kind of break the rules.” His grandmother always “gave you her full attention without judgment, and I think people naturally felt comfortable with her… Monroe kind of saw her a bit like a mother figure, and felt very, very cared for, and very safe in her presence.”

The female gaze

Few women photographed Monroe, and there’s a stark contrast between Arnold’s naturalistic, candid style and the more flirtatious interplay of her male counterparts. Wherever possible, Arnold shot outside the studio, capturing her subjects going about their everyday lives — a radical approach for celebrity photography at the time. “She wanted to show something not only of what it’s like to be a woman, but also of the human condition,” said Michael of the first female photographer to join the famed Magnum agency, and who over a six-decade career captured everyone from models at the Black fashion shows of Harlem to Malcolm X speaking in Washington.

After Monroe’s death, Arnold embargoed the vast majority of her photographs of the star, in the hopes of protecting her image from media exploitation. It was only in 1987 that Arnold published her pictures in the book: “Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation.” It included the 1955 image of her reading.

“It’s very hard to find the definitive story” of Monroe, said Atienza. And perhaps that’s part of her enduring allure; the search for the person behind the persona. In Arnold’s photo of Monroe reading Ulysses, the viewer, in turn, is invited to read between the lines.

Sheena McKenzie, CNN