Norman Mailer. Bert Stern. Marilyn Monroe

Six weeks before she died, Marilyn Monroe spent three days in a suite at the Bel-Air Hotel with a photographer, several cases of Dom Pérignon, and a tangle of chiffon scarves. What came out of those days became the last real record of her, and this edition sets Bert Stern's photographs from that summer of 1962 next to Norman Mailer's prose, two very different men circling the same impossible subject.

The commission was ordinary enough on paper, a sitting for Vogue. What it became was closer to an obsession conducted through a lens. Across three sessions Stern exposed well over two thousand frames, chasing every version of her he could coax into the light, clothed and unclothed, laughing and vacant, guarded and then suddenly, alarmingly open. Stern has been candid about the appetite behind it: get Marilyn, he has said in effect, and you would have everything. The pictures are the residue of a man trying to photograph an entire myth before it could slip away, with no idea how literally it was about to.

Mailer is a strange and apt choice to sit beside them. He never photographed anyone in his life; he wrote about Marilyn as though she were a national wound, a bright screen the whole country projected its wants onto. His prose is grand and frequently overheated, and set against these images it can read like a man talking loudly over someone who has already said everything she needs to with a single look. The mismatch turns out to be productive. The words keep straining toward the myth while the pictures keep collapsing back into the person, and the gap between the two is where the volume does its real thinking.

The setup itself is deceptively plain. A white background, a bed, daylight and strobe, almost no crew, the hush of a nearly empty room standing in for a studio full of assistants. That emptiness is the technique. Stripped of an audience and a script, the sitting becomes a slow negotiation between two people, part collaboration and part seduction, and the camera ends up recording the negotiation as much as the face. It is the whole distance between a session, which lasts minutes, and a sitting, which is a relationship compressed into a few days.

The images themselves swing between glamour and something rawer. In some she is the icon fully assembled, hair and light and practiced smile all in place, handing the camera the Marilyn it came for. In others the scarves slip, the makeup thins, and a tired, funny, intelligent woman in her mid-thirties looks back with startling directness. The sheer-scarf nudes are the frames history remembers, but the quieter ones, where the star apparatus briefly powers down, are the ones that actually ache.

Then there are the transparencies she crossed out. Handed the contact sheets to approve, she went after the frames she disliked with a hairpin and a marker, scratching Xs straight across her own face, gouging some past any hope of use. Stern published a number of the rejected frames anyway, scratches and all. There is genuine unease in that choice, a subject asserting final control over her own image and a photographer overruling her after her death, and the volume refuses to tidy it away. The defaced frames are among the most powerful things in it precisely because the violence in them is entirely hers.

It is easy to read the sitting as a photographer's conquest, and Stern's own telling sometimes encourages exactly that. The pictures argue otherwise. She is never merely captured in them; she is composing herself, feeding the lens as much as she chooses and no more, steering the mood with a tilt of the head or a hand drawn across the frame. The collaboration is unequal and a little predatory and also, unmistakably, a collaboration. Half of what makes these photographs great is her own decision, moment to moment, about how much to give away.

What a portrait photographer can carry out of this is not a technique but a tempo. Almost nothing here was snatched from a decisive instant in a hurry. It comes from duration, from staying in the room long enough that the performance tires and something underneath finally surfaces. The famous last frames are not flattering in the ordinary sense; they are intimate in a way that only time, trust, and a small charge of danger can produce. Mailer pushes at the same paradox from the other side, insisting she could be wholesome and carnal in a single breath, a contradiction the photographs keep quietly proving true.

The production honors all of it. The plates are large, the color of that summer holds, and the reproduction is faithful enough that you can read the grain of the film and the scratch of the hairpin alike. Scale matters with work this intimate. Given room, the frames stop being memorabilia and become what they always were, the close and complicated record of three days that turned out to be nearly the last.

Look again at the scratched transparencies near the end of the sequence. A woman took a sharp point to her own likeness and decided which pieces of herself the world would not be allowed to keep, and six weeks later the decision was out of her hands for good. The scratches are still there in the plates, her last edits on her own face.