Bert Stern

Bert Stern: Adventures captures in a sweeping array of images the remarkable career of Bert Stern, one of the legendary figures in contemporary photography. Stern's meteoric rise in the 1950s advertising world is represented by such classic images as his vodka advertisement in which an Egyptian pyramid is seen inverted in a martini glass. His portraits of stars ranging from Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn to Drew Barrymore, including the spellbinding 1962 "last sitting" photographs of Marilyn Monroe, form a gallery of the most beautiful women of our time. In the 1960s, he became the American prototype of the fashion photographer as media star, and his pictures of models from Twiggy to Iman have become icons to a new generation of photographers. In all Stern's work can be seen the remarkable graphic simplicity of his photographic art, as well as his extraordinary rapport with his subjects. Robert Sobieszek's text recounts the story of Stern's rise from a Brooklyn childhood to the pinnacle of success and glamour in Manhattan, and his spectacular fall from grace, while analyzing Stern's achievement and establishing its context in the recent history of commercial photography. Driven by an obsession with beautiful women, Stern lived on the edge, and when his commercial empire crumbled in the 1970s, he dropped from sight. Since the early 1980s, he has reestablished his career, though at a less frenetic pace, while his earlier work has undergone the reevaluation that has led to this retrospective volume.