Back to Home > Entertainment > Wednesday, Jul 19, 2006 TV Posted on Wed, Jul. 19, 2006 email this... Iconic star captured lens.

Back to Home > Entertainment > Wednesday, Jul 19, 2006 TV Posted on Wed, Jul. 19, 2006 email this print this PBS EXUBERANT SEXUALITY: The latest episode of PBS' American Masters documentary series examines the striking images created when Marilyn Monroe, unfiltered by script or director, went to work directly on a lens.

Marilyn Monroe: Still Life, the latest episode of PBS' American Masters documentary series, does just that. Less a biography than an impressionist essay, it examines the striking images created when Monroe, unfiltered by script or director, went to work directly on a lens. ''The camera adored her,'' says a photographer in Still Life, and the feeling was mutual.

Monroe had a small but significant talent for light comedy, little for drama (her most ''serious'' role, The Misfits, is nearly unwatchable) and none whatsoever for romance: From Joe DiMaggio to Arthur Miller to John F. Kennedy, she picked men who were ever more unlikely to share the spotlight with her.

But even as Monroe shed husbands and studio contracts like worn-out skins, reeling from one personal and professional disaster to another, she never stopped posing for photographers. Her work with dozens of them is on display in Still Life, and it's clear she reversed the ordinary equation: The artist is in front of the camera, not behind it.

There are the innocently bawdy pinups she posed for as a young starlet, wearing a bikini made of pulp magazines. Or the later incandescent shots by her friend and agent Milton H. Greene, her pale skin swathed in black velvet. Or the portraits in which Arnold Newman paired her with the poet Carl Sandburg, creating a weirdly compelling contrast between the craggy old man who wrote of beauty and the delectable young woman who lived it.

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