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Lawrence Schiller
American, born 1936
Lawrence Schiller (born Brooklyn, 1936) is an American photojournalist, author and filmmaker. His May 1962 photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the set of her last, unfinished film are among the defining images of the star; he later worked closely with Norman Mailer.
Biography
Lawrence Schiller was born in Brooklyn in 1936 and grew up near San Diego, where he was already taking pictures for a local newspaper at La Jolla High School. Through the 1960s he worked as a freelance photojournalist for Life, Look, Paris Match, Time, Newsweek and Stern. His photograph of Richard Nixon conceding the 1960 presidential election won the NPPA–Encyclopaedia Britannica award for best storytelling photograph.
Marilyn, 1962
Schiller first photographed Marilyn Monroe in 1960 on the set of Let’s Make Love. In May 1962, aged 25 and on assignment for Paris Match, he photographed her on the set of Something’s Got to Give, including the celebrated swimming-pool scene. The film was never finished; Monroe died that August, and the pictures were published around the world. His prints are identified by their place on the contact sheet — hence titles such as Roll 7, Frame 33, one of the twelve plates of his 2007 portfolio MARILYN 12. He told the story in Marilyn & Me (TASCHEN, 2012), the occasion of his first solo exhibition in the United States, at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York.
Author, producer and curator
In 1973 he conceived the book Marilyn with Norman Mailer, the first of several collaborations; his interviews and research underpinned Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Executioner’s Song, which Schiller then directed for television in 1982. Productions he directed or produced, among them The Executioner’s Song and Peter the Great, received several Emmy Awards. He curated American Visionary: John F. Kennedy’s Life and Times at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2016–2017) and Rebel Spirits: Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. at the New-York Historical Society (2018).