Douglas Kirkland: Photographer Returns To Home Soil With Immortalized Marilyn Monroe Exhibition

Marilyn, a selection of photographs from a now immortalized— shoot when Douglas Kirkland was invited to share the bed in which he photographed Marilyn Monroe naked under white silk sheets —will be on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center from July 12 - September 8, 2013.

“It feels good to come home, a place very special to me—I have wonderful memories,” exudes Kirkland, who commuted from Fort Erie to Buffalo to attend Seneca Vocational High School. In 1957-58, he worked as an assistant to the late Sherwin Greenburg (1922-2011), a legendary commercial photographer and filmmaker who had studios in Buffalo and New York City. “I’ve exhibited all over the globe in major spaces, and the Burchfield Penney is of that world class, very impressive,” says Kirkland who also plans to host a reunion in his old Fort Erie neighborhood with friends and family during his return for the opening. “I’m very enthusiastic about showing in the space.”

Marilyn Monroe was the American girl, seductress and unstable icon. On the evening November 17, 1961, in Los Angeles, Kirkland photographed in the year before her death August 5, 1962 Kirkland was a novice photographer working for Look Magazine. On the day of the Kirkland shoot Marilyn Monroe asked all of the assistants to leave and let the photographer and his model work alone. This set the stage for an interpersonal play that makes this work unique. An intimate engagement transpired and from the interaction. "Yes, she proposed my getting into bed with her, and what red-blooded young man wouldn't?,” questioned Kirkland. “The exception was I had a wife and two kids back home, and I grew up going to Sunday school, and something just stopped me.” He channeled all that sexual tension into the viewfinder and concentrated hard on the images, "I pumped the force of it into the pictures."

Kirkland remembers being with Marilyn Monroe on three different occasions for the project and says he met three distinct people. “The first meeting was to talk about the shoot and she was very much the girl next door, not the movie star that I expected,” he recalls. “Marilyn II was the luminous superstar during the shoot, the eye-opening, extraordinary icon. I encountered Marilyn III the following day, a totally different one, quite shocking. This one was dark, appeared depressed, but came alive when she looked at the pictures. Of all the people I’ve photographed, no one interests people more than that Marilyn I photographed that night and the magnitude of that one session is coming to the Burchfield Penney.”

Kirkland owns a legacy of capturing otherwise unreachable stars. He joined Life Magazine during the golden age of 60’s/70’s photojournalism. Among his assignments were essays on Greece, Lebanon and Japan, as well as fashion and celebrity work, photographing Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Pierre Cardin, Katherine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Orson Welles, among others.

Through the years, Kirkland has worked on the sets of over 100 motion pictures. Among them, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “2001 A Space Odyssey”, “Out of Africa”, “Titanic”, “Moulin Rouge”, “The Great Gatsby” and “Australia” Baz Luhrmann’s epic starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

Some of his books include Light Years, Icons, Legends, Body Stories, An Evening With Marilyn, the bestselling James Cameron’s Titanic, Freeze Frame and Coco Chanel: Three Weeks.