Bert Stern

Bert Stern – Friendship with Stanley Kubrick; debut as photographer in the Korean War

Bert Stern was born in New York on 3 October 1929. His later success was by no means inherent: The son of Jewish immigrants, he found school difficult and chose to leave early, eking out a meager living as a low-paid office assistant. During his duties in the post office of the long-forgotten magazine Look, he got to know the house photographer there, a young man called Stanley Kubrick, who inspired the still quite aimless and disoriented Bert Stern for photography. This was enhanced by a post as art director at the fashion magazine Mayfair. Stern, who later became world famous for his photographs of beautiful women, earned his first merits as photographer not in the glamorous and glittering world of the rich and beautiful, but on the dirty battlefield of the Korean War. Nevertheless, the quality of these shots led to him receiving a commission from Smirnoff vodka for an advertising campaign on his return home in 1953. 

Breakthrough as advertising photographer; passion for portrait shots

Bert Stern instantly pulled off a major coup when he placed a filled vodka glass in the desert and photographed it against a blurred pyramid background. This simple yet engaging visual language earned him the enthusiastic attention of the advertising industry and subsequently ensured a bulging book of orders. This set the course for a career as a photographer. However, the advertising jobs, no matter how innovatively he solved them, were not enough for Stern from the beginning: He also quickly became a successful documentary filmmaker and increased his fame with the highly acclaimed work Jazz on a Summer’s Evening - a film about the annual Newport Jazz Festival. Bert Stern increasingly took portraits of celebrities, including great film beauties such as Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor. Stern was also remembered by his early supporter Kubrick, who commissioned him to work on a campaign for his scandal-ridden film Lolita. 

The Last Sitting made the photographer and his model immortal

In 1962, Bert Stern held a three-day shoot with Marilyn Monroe on behalf of Vogue. The pictures, which became famous as The Last Sitting, comprised several thousand in number, and could only be published gradually, partially censored by the star herself with nail polish. Through the tragic death of the actress, the pictures acquired an additional rise in popularity and have become a legacy steeped in legend. Bert Stern described himself as an obsessive who acquired the objects of his desire through the act of taking photographs. At his peak, he held up to seven sessions a day – a workload managed only with the help of drugs. He was rumoured to have had numerous affairs with his models and even marriages. Stern enjoyed his privileged life and refrained from denying it, stating ambiguously that his love was for women and photography. 

Bert Stern died on 26 June 2013 in New York.