Bert Stern, a self-taught photographer who created high-concept images for advertising in the 1950s, made a renowned jazz film and captured Marilyn Monroe in a revealing series of photographs weeks before her death, died Tuesday at his home in New York City. He was 83.

Shannah Laumeister, a filmmaker who made a documentary about Stern in 2011, confirmed his death to the Associated Press but did not indicate the cause. She was his companion and said they were secretly married in 2009.

With his highly polished images for magazine stories and advertising campaigns, Stern became one of the most renowned photographers of his era.

When he began his career, he said, he didn’t know how to read a light meter. But by the mid-1950s, with his memorable images for Smirnoff vodka, Stern was transforming advertising photography from utilitarian snapshots to something more conceptual and self-consciously artistic.

“I don’t consider myself a photographer,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “I’m a designer with a camera.”

Beginning with a simple slogan – “The driest of the dry” – Stern searched for innovative ways to illustrate a vodka martini for Smirnoff. He depicted men in dark suits sitting amid sand dunes, holding martinis in their hands. He photographed a camel walking down New York’s Fifth Avenue.

For his most striking image, he traveled to Egypt and placed a martini glass in the sand, with the Great Pyramid of Giza towering behind it. The tip of the pyramid, suffused in a pinkish-gold light, is refracted upside down in the liquid inside the glass.

In Laumeister’s 2011 documentary, “Bert Stern: Original Mad Man,” acclaimed designer George Lois said Stern’s advertising photographs were “breathtaking because they were ideas.”

His images were credited with helping bring about advertising’s “creative revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, portrayed in the AMC series “Mad Men.”

Determined to produce a movie before he turned 30, Stern took film cameras to the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. The resulting documentary, “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” is considered a landmark.

Stern was in constant demand for his portraits, including of film stars Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot and Marlon Brando and 1950s supermodel Suzy Parker. He went to Rome to shoot photos of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton while they were making “Cleopatra” and beginning a torrid love affair.

In 1962 Vogue magazine asked him to photograph Monroe.

“I was interested in her as a personality, not as a model,” he said, “so I only took a few accessories. I didn’t want to shoot ‘fashion.’

The photos he took of Monroe in July 1962, weeks before her death on Aug. 5 at age 36, are known as “The Last Sitting.”