In his early years as a fashion photographer, Richard Avedon was known for his use of movement, as opposed to the rather stiff poses of the day. He carried this through to his work with Marilyn, as Tim Walker – who worked with Avedon in the mid 1990s – recalls in Avedon: Something Personal.
“Dick had put up this huge bubble-jet poster of a sequence of pictures he’d taken of Marilyn in a tight sequinned dress: she was laughing in one of them, she had her hands on her hips in another one, in another her head was down, then up … One morning the first thing, when I was making the coffee, I observed him standing in front of the poster mimicking all her poses, reliving the shoot in a way – almost asking, with his own body, ‘Did I get all I could?’ And of course he had!”