Becoming Marilyn (1945), 2006

Perhaps best known for capturing Marilyn Monroe’s rising star through his lens, Andre De Dienes was a photographer renowned for his celebration of the female form and his various portraits of Hollywood stars such as Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman. De Dienes initially began his career as a fashion photographer and began working for magazines such as Vogue and Life; upon becoming dissatisfied with fashion photography but retaining his interest in the female body, Di Dienes moved to California and began to capture photos of nude women on the beach or against a sprawling landscape. De Dienes’s first meeting with Marilyn Monroe took place prior to her fame; he took the highly recognized photos of her smiling and windswept on Tobay Beach and then went on to develop a huge portfolio of her pictures which helped propel her into stardom. Asides from his nude and Hollywood portraits, De Dienes also traveled across America and captured photographs of Native American culture; the Navajo, Apache and Hopi reservations were among the photographs captured.