\n The world\u2019s most famous blonde bombshell, perched on playground equipment, absorbed in a book. The studio make-up and lighting is gone; as are her shoes. It\u2019s 1955 and a summery glow radiates from her exposed limbs.\n <\/p>\n
\n The photo is playful \u2014 she wears a multi-colored romper in a children\u2019s setting. And simultaneously, serious. The book heavy in her arms is James Joyce\u2019s \u201cUlysses,\u201d a notoriously hard-going novel. She\u2019s almost finished it.\n <\/p>\n
\n The woman, of course, is a 29-year-old Marilyn Monroe, captured by American photojournalist Eve Arnold in Long Island, New York. Through Arnold\u2019s lens, the Hollywood icon is quiet, contemplative and natural. Is Monroe aware of the camera? That\u2019s up for debate.\n <\/p>\n
![\"Eve](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/marilyn-monroe-mount-sinai-long-island-1955-by-eve-arnold.jpg\")
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\n The photo is part of the National Portrait Gallery in London\u2019s new exhibition<\/a> exploring Monroe\u2019s agency in her own image-making. Opening Thursday, it features dozens of portraits \u2014 from the earliest pinups of an all-American gal called Norma Jeane, who would have turned 100 this month, to her last photoshoot on the Santa Monica beach, taken weeks before her death in 1962, aged 36.\n <\/p>\n \n Arnold\u2019s photo tells a lesser-known story of Monroe; an avid reader who had a personal library of more than 400 books spanning poetry, plays, philosophy and dense literature like \u201cUlysses.\u201d And no, the book wasn\u2019t a prop, said Michael Arnold, grandson of the photographer who died in 2012. \u201cEve was just setting up her cameras, and she saw that Monroe got it out and was reading it, waiting for her to get ready,\u201d he said during a phone call.\n <\/p>\n \n She just thought this is a perfect photograph to capture, to deliberately upend the dumb blonde stereotype, and to kind of show something of Monroe\u2019s intellectual life.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Michael Arnold on the moment his grandmother Eve Arnold took the photo.\n <\/p>\n \n Look closer, and Monroe is on the last pages \u2014 where the protagonist\u2019s wife in the novel, Molly Bloom, explores female sexuality in an unpunctuated stream of consciousness. \u201cWith her choice to be seen reading the end of \u2018Ulysses,\u2019 Monroe was clearly making a knowing point,\u201d wrote leading feminist art historian Griselda Pollock in her 2016 essay on the photo,<\/a> published in the Journal of Visual Culture. It was \u201can identification perhaps at so many levels with the words, the spoken words of an uneducated woman, allowed to have an inner and a sexual life, and to have the final say,\u201d added Pollock.\n <\/p>\n \n Monroe always had greater agency over her still images than her moving images, which were largely determined by the film studios and directors. \u201cWith photography, I think she felt she was more in control,\u201d said Georgia Atienza, assistant curator of the Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. She pointed to the actor\u2019s veto powers over her photographs, and the way she would go through contact sheets sometimes scratching with a hairpin the images she didn\u2019t want published. \u201cThere\u2019s this very conscious idea from her of controlling her image and getting out there the images that she was really happy with,\u201d said Atienza.\n <\/p>\n \n In Arnold, Monroe saw a photographer who could help visualize her shift from sex symbol to serious artist. The Long Island snap was taken months after Monroe had left Hollywood to start her own film company; she first became aware of the photojournalist years earlier.\n <\/p>\n \n In 1952, Arnold had photographed actress and singer Marlene Dietrich in the recording studio, using her signature natural style \u2014 no set, posing or tripod. \u201cI simply took her as she was,\u201d Arnold recalled in a 1987 BBC documentary<\/a>. The Dietrich photos caught the eye of Monroe, who saw Arnold at a party and told her: \u201cIf you can do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?\u201d Arnold remembered.\n <\/p>\n \n The pair worked together on several photoshoots over a decade, including on the film set of the \u201cThe Misfits\u201d in 1960; an emotionally fraught time for Monroe whose marriage to screenwriter Arthur Miller was in strife, and who found solace in Arnold\u2019s presence.\n <\/p>\n \n Arnold, who saw herself as a serious photojournalist, was initially reluctant to work with the Hollywood star, said Michael. \u201cBut I think there was something kind of magnetic about her that she kept coming back to.\u201d The women bonded over being relatively early in their careers, said Michael, adding that they \u201clearned to play together and kind of break the rules.\u201d His grandmother always \u201cgave you her full attention without judgment, and I think people naturally felt comfortable with her\u2026 Monroe kind of saw her a bit like a mother figure, and felt very, very cared for, and very safe in her presence.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Few women photographed Monroe, and there\u2019s a stark contrast between Arnold\u2019s naturalistic, candid style and the more flirtatious interplay of her male counterparts. Wherever possible, Arnold shot outside the studio, capturing her subjects going about their everyday lives \u2014 a radical approach for celebrity photography at the time. \u201cShe wanted to show something not only of what it\u2019s like to be a woman, but also of the human condition,\u201d said Michael of the first female photographer to join the famed Magnum agency, and who over a six-decade career captured everyone from models at the Black fashion shows of Harlem to Malcolm X speaking in Washington.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n After Monroe\u2019s death, Arnold embargoed the vast majority of her photographs of the star, in the hopes of protecting her image from media exploitation. It was only in 1987 that Arnold published her pictures in the book: \u201cMarilyn Monroe: An Appreciation.\u201d It included the 1955 image of her reading.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to find the definitive story\u201d of Monroe, said Atienza. And perhaps that\u2019s part of her enduring allure; the search for the person behind the persona. In Arnold\u2019s photo of Monroe reading Ulysses, the viewer, in turn, is invited to read between the lines.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary A new London exhibition explores Marilyn Monroe’s agency in her own image-making. It includes a 1955 photo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-473928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Photographer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/lon26966-2.jpg\")
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