Exhibition from June 1st to September 15th, 2026

Opening on Monday, June 1st, 2026, starting at 7 p.m.

The white corolla of Marilyn’s skirt, lifted by the draft from the subway grate at the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue… Invited by Billy Wilder to the set of The Seven Year Itch in 1954,  Sam Shaw gets as close as possible to what is unfolding. As close as possible to the flesh, bathed in a light as radiant as that of the stars whose twinkling continues to reach us, even though they have long since faded. What can be said about Marilyn Monroe that hasn’t already been written, told, and rehashed?

Too many words, too many clichés, too many prints endlessly reprinted and commented on ad nauseam. The most exposed platinum blonde in the world. And yet, in the portraits that the New York photographer took of the actress between 1954 and 1958, something of mystery is conveyed to us.

Of the intensity of a life. Of its beauty. And its vulnerability. Their first meeting dates back to the filming of Viva Zapata!, when Sam Shaw began working for various studios in the film industry. They became friends. In some ways, they were comrades-in-arms. In the arena of cinema – “Everyone says I can’t act.” – the photographer undeniably contributed to Marilyn’s performance. She felt confident under Shaw’s gaze.

Completely absorbed in the fervor of her budding romance with the writer Arthur Miller, her third husband, she no longer wore her heart on her sleeve. The photographs gathered within these pages are like sun-drenched images: Marilyn in the studio in the title role of Marilyn – ruby ​​red lips, cotton candy of curls blonder than blonde…

Of all the shots gathered in this small anthology, those taken at Roxbury, Miller’s estate in Connecticut, are unforgettable. Nothing spectacular, really. Moments of happy intimacy. But Shaw’s gaze has never been so tactile, allowing us to feel the creamy pallor of that fresh, milky skin, to penetrate the halo of softness and surrender of that face left to itself.

On the back of one of the prints, where the couple is leaning against a tree, Marilyn had written: “Films are my business, but Arthur is my life”—Perhaps. The boundary is fluid, porous for someone who exposes herself, to the point of vertigo, to the art of doubling. The images of Marilyn at her dressing table, engaged in the ritualistic ceremony of applying makeup, offer a disturbing mise en abyme where both the distance and the closeness between her and the Other are revealed.

Norma Jean knew better than anyone how to capture, on the surface of the mirror, the dazzling reflection of Marilyn Monroe. To bring forth, to unleash the exquisite and volatile Presence, to study its expressions, to adopt its poses. To tame it to the point of playing the game with irresistible grace.

Sam Shaw’s photographs partake of this incantatory power. Poets possess the gift of second sight. Truman Capote, in his incisive and dazzling portrait of the actress, likens Marilyn’s radiance to “a hummingbird in flight,” suggesting that only a camera or the photographer’s watchful eye could capture its poetry.

But this fleeting light proves powerful enough to dispel the shadow of the little girl who never had a place and whom no one expects anywhere. “I just want to be wonderful.” Marilyn put all her art and talent into approaching that part of herself that most of us ignore or barely allow to be glimpsed, that clarity of soul that Sam Shaw’s portraits reveal to us in all its fervor and breadth.

“MARILYN: Remember. I said that if people ever asked what I looked like, who Marilyn Monroe really was, what would you say? […] I bet you’d tell them I’m a dumb bitch. A loser.”

Truman Capote: Of course. But I would also say…
[…] I would say that you are a radiant child.

(Truman Capote, “A Radiant Child” in Music for Chameleons, Paris, Gallimard, 1982)

Jérôme GODEAU