femaleshapes:

pussylequeer:

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Tom Kelley in 1949

“Reflecting on the Marilyn Monroe nudes, Kelley remembers that he posed the out-of-work actress on a bolt of bright red velvet cloth. She was paid $50.00 for her modeling, telling Kelley that she would use the money to make an installment on her car. In retrospect, Kelley is proud of the fact that no matter how one turned the photograph, its composition was impeccably symmetrical. The Photograph, turned calendar, brought him $900.00 from a printer who sold it in quantity for millions. It also brought Kelley untold fame.Strangely, in a sense, Kelley nudes of Marilyn were to prove to be the catalyst in the sexual revolution occurring some five years after he made the photographs. Up until that time, the nude female form was relegated to a few sleezy pre-Playboy-type girlie books if not out- and-out hardcore pornography. To be sure, one distinguished publication did print nudes; however, the National Geographic’s genre of undraped, unsightly epidermis and/or dangling mammary glands could hardly be classified with a contemporary Playboy centerfold. But Kelley and Marilyn made the naked body a thing beautiful to behold. No longer was a nude picture of a beautiful woman an object to be viewed from the rear of the barn or the secrecy of one’s bedroom. Marilyn readily admitted that it was she who had posed for Kelley’s camera when confronted by United Press Hollywood correspondent Aleene Mosby. And for years thereafter, she would autograph copies of the calendar for servicemen with consummate pride.”

- Norman Mailer