Though many have come before him and many will come after him, Bert Stern has stood out as one of the most prominent male gazers in all of art history.

I mean the list of women he has looked at is incredible - Marilyn Monroe, Twiggy, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn...the list goes on. His eyes should be in some sort of hall of fame for how good at looking at women he is.

Born in  Brooklyn in 1929, Stern always knew he wanted to be an artist, but his dad told him that he should probably be a banker instead, what with the Great Depression and everything. So Stern compromised and got a job in the mailroom of Look magazine where he became buds with Stanley Kubrick. From there he got an opportunity to do an ad for Smirnoff Vodka. He decided that he was going to fill a martini glass with vodka and set it in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt so that the image of the pyramid would be inverted in the glass. This turned out brilliantly and from there his career took off as an art director.

Soon he was taking pictures of something he was incredibly passionate about: women. Something new and different for men! And shockingly enough, he had affairs with a lot of these women. First was Teddy. He got engaged to her because he wanted to have sex with her. But then Dorothy came along and told him to leave Teddy so he did. Then Dorothy pulled a knife on him because she couldn’t handle his cheating. Then there was the great love of his life Allegra Kent, a ballet dancer. She was the mother of his three children, but things went awry when Bert got into amphetamines. He went a little psycho so Allegra took the children and bailed. She also just didn’t really love him that much and referred to him as her sperm donor, which is way harsh. Last of all, there was Bert’s “white buffalo”- Marilyn Monroe. He took a series of sexy pictures of her called The Last Sitting because she died six weeks after they were taken. He loved her almost as much as Allegra but he never got to sleep with her so that was that.

Stern was always an incredibly camera-shy man. He never liked being in front of the camera. But his last lover, Shannah Laumeister convinced him to do a documentary about his life, which he was really grumpy about but cooperated with. His legacy consists of his beautiful photos of beautiful women and popularizing Smirnoff in the United States, for which college freshman across the nation are eternally grateful.