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MARILYN MONROE, NEW YORK, 1956 CECIL BEATON

Cecil Beaton was many things, some of them terrible. He was a photographer, a painter, a designer, a diarist, a snob (partly because he wasn’t as high in the English class system as he would have liked to have been), friend to the great and good, and insecure enough to snipe at each and every one of them, and in 1938 responsible for an anti-Semitic slur in the margins of a drawing for Vogue that he spent the rest of his life apologising for.

In short, throughout his 76 years up to his death in 1980 he was a force of nature for good and ill. “Be daring, be different, be impractical,” he once said. “Be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

Beaton was many things, but he was never ordinary. Nor was his work rate. The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive holds some 110,000 negatives alone. The V&A has a further 18,000 prints, negatives and transparencies; 30 years of photographs of the royal family. And the Imperial War Museum holds 7000 photographs of his work for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War.

As Lisa Immordino Vreeland notes in her introduction to her sumptuous new book Love, Cecil: “You can witness the story of the 20th century unfold before your very eyes.”

Here is his 1956 image of Marilyn Monroe. “With the possible exception of a Scotch landscape,” Beaton wrote, “there has seldom been such an ever-changing subject for the photographer.”

Love, Cecil: A Journey with Cecil Beaton by Lisa Immordino Vreeland is published by Abrams, priced £40