He got Marilyn Monroe for $5. It was 1983 and North Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery was making a transition from an amateur studio to a professional gallery with a focus on photography.
As the gallery's populist curator, Chris Loranger wanted to exhibit the work of Richard Avedon, a photographer famous for celebrity portraits as well as images of prisoners and political leaders.
Unfortunately, the fee for the show was "exceptionally high," Loranger recalls.
After some debate, he opted to buy two of Avedon's prints.
One photo featured New York socialite Marella Agnelli, and the other was of movie star Marilyn Monroe.
"She just let her guard down for a second, and in that second he happened to take that picture and it's poignant to me, and human," Loranger says of the 1957 gelatin silver print. "It's not Marilyn Monroe the superstar, it's Norma Jean."
Loranger paid $2,000 for each photograph, and then raffled them off. Tickets cost $5 and included gallery admission.
"I think the two raffles brought in something like $16,000," he says.
Over 30 years later, the Vancouver-area man who won the photo in the raffle is now putting it up for auction.
The photo, signed by the photographer, is expected to fetch between $40,000 and $60,000, according to Maynards marketing manager Loren Proctor.
In the book Richard Avedon Portraits, the photographer describes Monroe dancing, singing and flirting for hours before he took the memorable shot.
"And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone."
Avedon walked over, unwilling to photograph Monroe without her knowledge.
"As I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no."
For Loranger, the photo is a glimpse into Monroe's tragic story. She died in 1962 at 36 of an overdose of barbiturates.
"Had she lived, I don't think this image that's up for sale would have a quarter of the value," Loranger says. "The tragedy of her death is what really put so much value on that image."
In laying the groundwork for the future of Presentation House Gallery, Loranger says he was looking for photos that would garner press and public attention.
"The reason I was interested in making the gallery focus on photography was it was the medium of my generation, the baby boomers," he says. "We were the first generation to be saturated with imagery."
Following Monroe's death, playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets pronounced she'd died of "a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul."
For Loranger, the photo is an intimate portrait.
"I find that really, really touching 'cause I think she was quite a different person than the image most people have of her," he says.
While he is proud of the show, Loranger did acknowledge he wishes he'd kept the picture.
