André de Dienes:
Carving the Goddess

PHOTOGRAPHY | ANDRÉ DE DIENES       WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

The work of Andre De Dienes appears courtesy of Twin Palms Publishing

Was Marilyn Monroe destined to become a legend? Or was it that first set of photographs by André de Dienes that lit the fuse and sent her into global orbit? There is no single answer, but whatever way you look at it, that celebrated first sesSion with the nineteen year old Norma Jeane stamped MM on our group subconscious and placed André de Dienes in the hall of fame as the first of a legion of photographers to capture the many moods of Marilyn.

Recently, André De Dienes was featured in an exhibition at London's fashionable Atlas Gallery which coincided with the publication of Studies of the Female Nude from Twin Palms Publishers with 100 of the photographer's most important nude images. For the first time ever the public at large is being presented an artist who portrayed a skill and mastery over the nude going well above and beyond the cult icon he created by photo-graphing Marilyn Monroe.

André de Dienes was born in 1913 in Transylvania, in what is now Romania. Following his mother's suicide he left home at 15 and travelled across Europe, mostly by foot, before ending up in Tunisia, where he made a living doing odd jobs, learned to paint and bought his first camera, a 35mm Retina. In 1933 de Dienes arrived in Paris to study art and bought a new Rolleiflex. He made a living selling photos to publishers, including the Communist news-paper Humanité. He worked for Associated Press until 1936, when Parisian couturier Captain Molyneux encouraged him to become a fashion photographer.

In 1938, with the help of Esquire magazine editor Arnold Gingrich, he emigrated to the US and settled in New York working for Esquire, Vogue, Life and Montgomery Ward. De Dienes spent his vacations travelling and taking pictures of the scenic grandeur of the western United States. He did a series of studies of the Hopi, Navajo and Apache Indians and became more interested in photographing people.

André de Dienes grew dissatisfied with the restrictions of fashion photography and in 1944 moved to Hollywood to pursue his passion for photographing nudes and outdoor scenes. Both emotional and passionate, de Dienes' objective was to see beauty in nature and to make his photographs true to life, he never retouched them. He believed that to take good photographs one must have great patience, imagination and endurance, and the capacity to reveal both truth and beauty.

In the foreword of Studies of the Female Nude Dienes writes, “The possession of a beautiful body is not in itself enough. The model’s attitude towards her work is equally important. Not many girls really enjoy posing in the nude, and it must be admitted that their cooperation is mostly for the purpose of earning fees. Needless to say, these are of no use at all.” Dienes was a man not interested in the glamour or the politics of his work. For him it was about creating some-thing beautiful and nurturing an idea of the feminine ideal.

To support himself, de Dienes freelanced for the studios and photographed many stars including Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Ronald Reagan, Jane Russell and Anita Ekberg. He rapidly became known as one of the top glamour photographers and articles documenting his pioneering darkroom techniques in photo montage appeared in U.S. Camera, Figure Quarterly, Figure Annual, Classic Art Photography, and many more pioneering magazines.

Andre de Dienes' work on nudes have generated twenty-four books published in the US, England and Germany. Marilyn Mon Amour was published in 1985 by St. Martin's Press, and Marilyn in 2002 by Taschen. Newsweek featured the three-volume book in a six page cover story. Married twice, de Dienes died of cancer in 1985 and his second wife, Shirley T. Ellis de Dienes, preserves and exhibits her late husband’s legendary archive.