Montreal photographer George S. Zimbel died Monday of natural causes in Montreal. He was 93 years old. Born in the United States, he was renowned for his famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe and her white dress lifted by the air from a New York subway entrance, taken in 1954.
A member of the last generation of photographers faithful to the legacy of the Photo League, he had photographed many American stars in the 1950s and 1960s before leaving his native country in 1971 for Canada because of his opposition to the Vietnam.
George Zimbel’s photographs are in many private collections, but also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, in New York, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography. of Tokyo, in particular. He has also worked with major media such as Life, The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is survived by his four children, Matt, Andrew, Ike and Jodi and nine grandchildren. His wife, writer and therapist Elaine A. Sernovitz-Zimbel, who shared his life for more than 61 years, died in 2017.