Lawrence Schiller. Marilyn & Me

By 1962 there was already too much Marilyn Monroe to see clearly. The image had been reproduced, mythologized, and sold past the point where a single new picture could add much. Into that saturation steps a slim first-person account from a twenty-three-year-old freelancer who happened onto the set of her final, unfinished film.

Lawrence Schiller photographed Monroe during the swimming-pool scene of Something's Got to Give, the nude swim she staged to yank the world's attention off Elizabeth Taylor. The pictures are here, but the volume is really the story around them. It recounts how a young photographer negotiated with a star who understood her own image far better than he did.

One frame catches her at the pool's edge, wet and laughing, aware to the millimeter of where the lens sits. Nothing about it is candid, and that is the revelation: the spontaneity is a performance she is directing as much as he is. Watch closely and you can see her working the camera the way a good actor works a scene partner.

The timing gives the images a weight they never asked for. Monroe was dead within weeks of the sitting, the film unfinished, the studio having fired and rehired her in the space of days. Every frame now reads through that ending, whether or not it earned the freight.

Schiller grasped early that the picture was also a transaction. The nude swim was strategic, timed to reclaim column inches, and the resulting images were assets both of them meant to sell. The account is unusually frank about the money and the leverage, which is where a working photographer will find the most to chew on.

The real value is in that negotiation over control. Monroe reviews the contact sheets, crosses out the frames she dislikes with a grease pencil, and decides which version of herself reaches the public. Decades later Schiller is honest about how little of it was his doing and how much was hers.

There is craft in how he handled her, too. He worked fast, kept the setups simple, and let her run the mood, which is the right instinct with a subject who knows more than the person holding the camera. The restraint is its own quiet lesson.

It arrives, too, as a record of a vanished working method. This was a moment when a single freelancer could still talk his way onto a major set and leave owning the negatives. Nothing in the present image economy quite resembles that arrangement.

As a photographic object it is slighter than its subject deserves. The image count is modest, the reproduction serviceable rather than lavish, and a reader who comes for Monroe gets a fair amount of one man's memory in the bargain. The prose occasionally tips into the wistful register that Monroe stories almost always slide toward.

What keeps it honest is the author's own awareness that closeness is not the same as understanding. He would go on to photograph Barbra Streisand and to make the images that ride alongside The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a whole career spent near the story without claiming to be its center. Here he is nearer than ever, and still working from the outside.

The pictures raise a problem they cannot solve, which may be why they linger. When a subject dictates her own image this precisely and dies weeks later, whose portrait is it in the end, the photographer's or hers? The account leaves the grease pencil on the table and declines to answer.