Bertram "Bert" Stern (October 3, 1929 - June 26, 2013) was a self-taught American commercial photographer.

Biography

Stern was the son of Jewish immigrants and grew up in Brooklyn. His father worked as a children’s portrait photographer. After dropping out of high school at the age of 16, he gained a job in the mail room at Look magazine. He became art director at Flair magazine, where Stern learned how to develop film and make contact sheets, and started taking his own pictures. In 1951, Stern was drafted into the United States Army and was sent to Japan and assigned to the photographic department.

In the 1960s, his heavy use of amphetamines led to the destruction of his marriage to Allegra Kent, a ballerina. By the late 1970s, Stern returned to the U.S. to photograph portraits and fashion.

After his death his survivors began a fight with his 'secret wife', an actress, Shannah Laumeister, who also directed a documentary film about him, called "Bert Stern Original Madman". The reviewer said her film was "An unappealing jumble of sex, regret and hero worship, “Bert Stern” is an odd tribute to brilliance muffled by lust. “Women are everything,” Mr. Stern tells us, wistfully. “Man is just a muscle.” Maybe so; but Ms. Laumeister needs to be reminded that it’s what’s above the neck that makes him interesting.

Stern's son, Bret Stern and his daughter, Trista Wright, as well as his two grandchildren, Miranda Wright and Georgia Wright, frames Laumeister's film as "subterfuge and guise to gain intimate knowledge about his father's life, mental state, weakening mental capacity and thought processes, in order to manipulate Bert Stern and gain full control over his estate. In June 2013, after his father passed away, Bret Stern learned that Laumeister had induced Bert Stern into making a new will that left everything to her except a few small cash gifts to his children and a few other people."

Photographer

Stern's first professional assignment was in 1955 for a Madison Avenue advertising agency for Smirnoff vodka. His best known work is arguably The Last Sitting, a collection of 2,500 photographs taken for Vogue of Marilyn Monroe over a three-day period, six weeks before her death. Stern's book The Last Sitting was published in 1982 and again in 2000.

He has photographed Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Drew Barrymore and Lindsay Lohan (recreating The Last Sitting), among others, in addition to his work for advertising and travel publications.

Bert Stern directed and produced Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959), a documentary film record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. In 1999, the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]