Garry Winogrand’s exuberant photo of Marilyn standing over a Manhattan subway grate while filming a scene for The Seven Year Itch graces the poster art for American People, a group exhibition on display until October 13, 2025, at the Museo Carmen Thyssen in Malaga, Spain.
“Several decades of documentary photography, from 1930 to 1980, shape, in this selection of more than fifty images from the José Luis Soler Vila Collection, a mosaic of faces and characters seen and captured on the streets and in everyday spaces of the United States by a brilliant group of eleven North American photographers. Leading photographers in their discipline, they exemplify a direct look at reality that, with different objectives and sensibilities, they all shared and promoted, fascinated by capturing life with their cameras to, quite simply, show it as it is seen.
We begin the tour by presenting pieces by pioneers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Louis Faurer, and conclude with the color works of Harry Callahan, Anthony Hernández, and Tod Papageorge from the 1960s onward. A miscellany of snapshots of American people and their daily lives reveals the importance and evolution of the genre, as well as putting a face to the diverse and complex social realities of the United States over the course of six decades.
By capturing real-life images, documentary photography revealed itself as a hybrid genre permeable to historical testimony, portraiture, the impulse of the street, psychological and sociological research, social denunciation, irony, and narration. Thus, the coexistence and combination of different trends, from photojournalism to direct, humanist, and street photography, enriched the documentary essence and allowed photographers to give their work a personal stamp.
In short, starting from reality, reproducing it accurately, and even giving it an enigmatic dimension is the common aspiration of all these approaches. And looking at the ordinary, at what often goes unnoticed, and turning photography into another example of life.”
Best known for his vibrant images of street life, Garry Winogrand was then working for the PIX agency on an introduction from Ed Feingersh (who would later also photograph Marilyn.)
Winogrand captured these additional images of Marilyn (not part of this exhibition) on 52nd and Lexington on the night of September 15, 1954.
He was also among the press pack two days earlier, when Marilyn filmed another scene at a brownstone house on East 61st Street, waving from the window to co-star Tom Ewell while blow-drying her hair.
She covered her lacy silk slip with a white terrycloth robe while preparing to shoot the second window scene, which closes the movie.
And finally, another Winogrand shot from that day graces the cover of the aptly named anthology, All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader (2002), edited by Yona Zeldis McDonough.
The Marilyn Report 