When people think of Marilyn Monroe’s photographers, names like Milton Greene, Bert Stern, or Philippe Halsman come to mind first. Ben Ross is rarely part of that conversation. But he should be. The photographs Ross took of Marilyn Monroe rank among the most striking ever made of her — raw, quietly emotional, and unlike the polished studio shots the public was used to seeing.
Ross was born in New York in 1916 under the name Benjamin Rosenblatt. He found his way into photography not through formal training but through a natural instinct for capturing moments as they happened. He joined Parade magazine, where he worked alongside his brother Sid, taking on the role of journalist and photographer. His approach set him apart from the beginning. He had no interest in staged, carefully arranged shots. He wanted to catch people as they actually were — unguarded and real.
Ross himself put it plainly: “I never did that. I basically photographed during interviews, or, you know, just as they were.” Photographing celebrities was not his usual territory. He moved through the world of journalism, covering stories and people, not building portfolios of the famous. That changed during a visit to Hollywood in 1951.
During that trip, Ross was asked to photograph Marilyn Monroe. She was not yet the full-blown superstar she would become by 1953, but she was already well known and already carrying the habits that would follow her throughout her career. Ross waited an hour and a half for her to show up. He described the experience without bitterness: “I got Marilyn Monroe walking down the street the first time I photographed her. She kept me waiting for an hour and a half.”
Her lateness was not the thing that stuck with him, though. What stayed with Ross was who she turned out to be once she arrived. He described her as “very charming” and noted that she was “a person with heart, not the usual Hollywood person.” He added that she was “probably the only Hollywood star that you could relate to.” Coming from a photographer who spent his career capturing everyday people, that was a genuine observation, not a publicity line.
Marilyn’s anxiety about her appearance had already taken hold by this point. Even before she reached the height of her fame, she worried about how she looked on camera and spent considerable time preparing herself before stepping in front of a lens. That combination — deep self-consciousness paired with an open, warm personality — made her both a challenging and rewarding subject for a photographer like Ross.
Over the course of Marilyn’s lifetime, Ross photographed her three times in total. The most celebrated of those sessions was known as the ‘Emotions’ session, named for the range of feeling Marilyn conveyed across the images. The photographs from that session show a side of her that Hollywood’s promotional machine rarely put forward — thoughtful, moody, and at moments almost vulnerable.
Ross’s candid style meant he was not directing Marilyn into poses or telling her how to hold her face. He was observing her, waiting for something genuine to surface. His method trusted the subject rather than controlling them, and with Marilyn, that approach produced images that feel less like advertisements and more like portraits.
By 1953, Marilyn Monroe was operating at the peak of her early Hollywood career. That year saw the release of both “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “How to Marry a Millionaire,” making her one of the biggest box-office draws in the country. The public image she carried was one of playful glamour. Ross’s photographs from this period complicate that image in the best way.
In his shots, Marilyn does not look like a carefully managed star. She looks like a person — sometimes laughing, sometimes lost in thought, sometimes carrying a weight that the camera catches before she can hide it. That tension between the public persona and the private woman is exactly what makes these photographs so compelling.
Ross never became a celebrity photographer in the traditional sense. He did not build a career around access to stars or use his Monroe photographs as a launching pad into the Hollywood circuit. He remained a journalist at heart, someone who picked up a camera because it helped tell the truth about what he was seeing.
That honesty shows clearly in the Monroe photographs. There is no artifice in the framing, no obvious attempt to make her look like a product. The images simply record her as she was on those days — glamorous, yes, but also human in a way that Hollywood worked hard to smooth over.
The ‘Emotions’ session in particular stands as a document of a woman at the top of her public life while clearly carrying something more complex underneath. Ross captured that duality not by hunting for it, but simply by being patient and letting Marilyn be herself in front of his camera.
Few photographers who crossed paths with Marilyn Monroe did so with as little ego and as much genuine curiosity as Ben Ross. He was not there to build a legend. He was there to take a picture of the person standing in front of him — and in doing so, he ended up creating some of the most honest images she ever sat for.
