One day in 1945, fashion photographer Andr de Dienes met an aspiring model named Norma Jeane Dougherty. It was a momentous moment, both for his personal life and his photographic portfolio. Over the next few years, he would be briefly engaged to Norma Jeane, take a number of adventurous road trips with her, and build up a stunning series of portraits which would help launch her modeling, and later movie, career.

This collection of de Dienes’s photographs and private memoirs offers an intimate picture of Norma Jeane the woman, before she was Marilyn the icon. From their trip to see Norma Jeanes mother in a mental hospital to Marilyns visit a few days before her death, de Dienes’s emotion-laden archive, often annotated with handwritten notes, offers a deeply personal account of Monroe’s transformation from a sensitive, ambitious girl into a deeply troubled global star.

Format: Hardcover
Published: 2026
Publisher: Taschen GmbH
Pages: 480
Language: English
ISBN 10: 3754407090
ISBN 13: 9783754407097