Most Alluring Bodies.

Byline: Rebecca Mead

Photographers' favorite portraits of the female form.

If every picture tells a story, then these pictures comprise a revealing collection, with a tantalizing suggestion of a narrative captured in each frame. There's Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits, a movie written for her by her third husband, Arthur Miller, and captured by still photographer Eve Arnold. You wouldn't know from her smile that the marriage was on the rocks and that production had to be halted for the star--who was playing a washed-up divorcee--to go to the hospital under mysterious circumstances. (Two years later, Miller, having divorced Monroe, married Inge Morath, who was Arnold's fellow photographer on the shoot.) Equally layered is Burt Glinn's shot of four dumbstruck GIs and the object of their unflinching attention, a stripper in a G-string, heels, and a lot of feathers: Talk about Rosie the Riveter. Just as intriguing as the sultry woman in Saul Leiter's Hopper-esque portrait is the blurry guy in the distance, obliviously futzing with his car (who is he?); while Tom Munro's subject, shot from an anonymous distance, is no less a status symbol than the nifty boat beside which she reclines (who owns them both?). Michael Thompson's portrait of a nude Cynthia Nixon is coy (whom is she talking to?) as well as revealing, while Marilyn Minter turns the body into a daunting geographical terrain, to which no map seems adequate (which way, exactly, is up?). With all these images, the best thing to do is read and discuss.

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