Douglas Kirkland, photographer, was born in Canada and started his career on small newspapers there. Moving to New York, he was employed as an assistant to Irving Penn in the early 1960s. At the age of 24 he was hired as a staff photographer for Look magazine, for which he undertook a great variety of assignments over the course of eleven years. His first cover for the magazine was a photograph of Elizabeth Taylor; soon he had also captured Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. His photographs of Monroe, to which he fortuitously retained the rights, have become his signature images. Later he photographed a number of stars including Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner for Life. Consciously reinventing his career and spurning specialisation, Kirkland has worked on the sets of more than 100 films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Out of Africa (1985), Titanic (1997) and Moulin Rouge (2001). His books include ICONS: Creativity with Camera and Computer (1993), including his photographs of Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, Robert de Niro and Stephen Hawking; Legends (1997), Body Stories (1997), James Cameron's Titanic (1997), and Woza Africa (1997).
