Marilyn Monroe photos by Bert Stern sell for $146,500

Associated Press – In this Sept. 9, 1954 file photo, Marilyn Monroe poses over the updraft of a New York subway grate. December 17, 2008 -- NEW YORK CITY A collection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken for Vogue magazine the year she died has been auctioned in New York for nearly $150,000. A spokeswoman for Christie's auction house says the 36 photos taken by Bert Stern sold for $146,500 on Tuesday. The pre-sale estimate was $100,000 to $150,000. Christie's says the photos from a 1962 shoot were the last professional images taken of Monroe before she died that year of a drug overdose. They ran in Vogue instead as a memorial. The buyers were anonymous. View 12-photo slideshow here. Bert Stern's best known work is arguably The Last Sitting, a collection of 2,500 photographs taken of Marilyn Monroe over a three day period, six weeks before her death, shot for Vogue. Stern published Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting in 1992. In it, he recounted being enchanted by her until a near-intimate encounter after the second day of shooting; he then realized that she was deeply troubled.