Bert Stern, the famed photographer best known for his sensual portraits of Marilyn Monroe, passed away on Wednesday at 83 years old – but his iconic images are set to live on, most likely in other people’s living rooms. Stern’s raw and poignant series of Monroe, The Last Sitting, photographed for Vogue at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles just weeks before her drug overdose death, will be auctioned off on September 10. The 2,500 photographs, taken over three days in June 1962, were originally published in a 1982 book titled The Last Sitting, and a second book, Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting, that came out in 2000. An undisclosed number of the nude and semi-nude portraits will go under the hammer at Freeman’s Auctioneers in Philadelphia for an estimated $10,000 to $15,000 each. ‘It was a one-time-in-a-lifetime experience, to have Marilyn Monroe in a hotel room,’ Stern said in the 2010 documentary Bert Stern: Original Madman. ‘I would never have taken any nudes of Marilyn if she didn’t want to do it,’ he added in the film. Stern died Wednesday at his Manhattan home, confirmed Ms Laumeister, who said she and Stern had been secretly married since 2009. ‘He’ll be remembered as someone who loved women and loved taking pictures and putting things he felt strongly about in the camera,’ she said. As a commercial photographer, Stern helped redefine fashion advertising and portraiture in the Fifties and Sixties, photographing the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Truman Capote; and launching his career with an ad campaign for Smirnoff Vodka.