Marilyn Monroe, Actress, New York City, 1957

'From his 1954 photograph of Marilyn Monroe, characteristically, Avedon banished every trace of the erotic charm and effervescence for which the actress was celebrated. She appears here crestfallen. Behind the beautiful face, her spirits sag as gravely as the body beneath the sequined dress. Avedon's portrait has turned his subject from a star into a mere mortal. Avedon published this image in his 1964 book Nothing Personal with the caption, "Marilyn Monroe, Actress," as if she were someone unknown, an example of a social type like the subjects labeled only by their professions in the 1920s work of August Sander (to which Avedon was, quite consciously, making allusion).'
-Colin Westerbeck (Quoted in Beyond the Photographic Frame: On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company, 1989, p. 374