Une blonde à Manhattan

He was a meteor that left no traces. Ed Feingersh was one of the most promising photographers of the fifties in New York, an adept of natural light, whom Edward Steichen integrated into his famous exhibition «The Family of Man», at the MoMA in 1955. Due in part to his bohemian side, his premature death (in 1961, at the age of 35) and the bankruptcy of his agency Pix, the greater part of his snapshots had disappeared. Up to the accidental rediscovery, in a warehouse in Brooklyn in 1987, of the series he had dedicated to Marilyn Monroe for the magazine Redbook in 1955. The book presents the five days the desperado photographer shared with the mythical blonde, from Madison Square Garden to dusk at Costello’s. But he is more convincing in the description of the photographer’s rushed itinerary, as a contemporary of the experiments carried out by Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, and which symbolize the end of an era: jazz, black and white, Cartier Bresson’s «decisive moment», the daily events pushed off the scene by the Sixties, Kennedy, rock’n’roll, color photograph, television and mass consumption …

• Une blonde à Manhattan by Adrien Gombeaud, Le Serpent à plumes, 2011, 216 p., 19 €