Marilyn Monroe was one of the brightest stars of the 20th century, and there are very few photos of her that people have not seen. Yet photographer Anton Fury stumbled upon a treasure trove of unseen photographs of Marilyn Monroe, and he’s spent the last three decades trying to figure out who created them.
In 1980, Fury paid $2 for an envelope of 33 negatives at a garage sale in New Jersey, only to discover once he developed them in his dark room at home that they were of Monroe. A second envelope he purchased contained over 70 photographs of actress Jayne Mansfield.
Shocked by his discovery — which show the iconic blond bombshell lounging poolside in a white bikini — Fury says he set out to find who shot the images. That turned out to be easier said than done.
“When I found them, there was no Internet,” Fury explained to the New York Daily News. “There were limited resources to research them.”
Over the next 30 years Fury says he did his best to track down the mystery photographer. It wasn’t this week when he met up with Los Angeles art dealer David Streets that he decided to release some of the images to the public. According to Streets, the photots were taken sometime around 1950, when the ‘Some Like it Hot’ star was just 24 years old.
Another interesting piece in the puzzle: the same unidentified man appears in both the Monroe and Mansfield images, which are in different locations.
“We know that Monroe and Mansfield were here working at the same time, were contemporaries and friends,” Streets said. “So, there’s an intertanglement there that we’re going to unravel and see where the mystery leads.”
Fury and Streets hope the newly-released images will spark someone’s memory.
“Hopefully someone out there, perhaps another photographer, because there are tons of photographers who did extensive work with her, will be able to shed some light on this,” Streets said.