The Lindsay Lohan photos crashed the New York Magazine servers yesterday, the printed magazine cover caused some uproar. As Linday Lohan attempts to pass as Marilyn Monroe, with the assistance of legendary photographer, Bert Stern, we are reminded there was only one Marilyn Monroe and “The Last Sitting.”

The incomparable Marilyn Monroe in Bert Stern’s original “Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting”

View many more photographs from The Last Sitting here. View a video compilation of photographs here.

The New York Times notes

The image is causing a ruckus in the blogosphere, and not because her nipples can be ogled through the thin triangle of pink chiffon she clasps with her mouth like a schnauzer. The photo and eight more inside the magazine mimic, frame for frame, a handful of the fabled and ubiquitous pictures known as “The Last Sitting” that the photographer Bert Stern took of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, six weeks before she died of an overdose.

To make the echo that much more macabre, Mr. Stern has taken these pictures as well. As an editor’s note explains, he volunteered for the duty. Like a star quarterback who has never moved on, Mr. Stern has apparently been hankering to relive the old days — to find just the right sad beauty with whom to recreate his erotic and melancholy images.

“How did it come about?” the editor’s note asks. “Stern had decided that Lohan was the perfect actress for this project, and when he asked if we might be interested in working with him on it, we were naturally more than enthusiastic.”

A cover line that hangs to the right of Ms. Lohan’s freckled leg heightens the unseemliness of the project. It reads, “Heath Ledger’s Double Life.” In a short profile of Ms. Lohan that precedes Mr. Stern’s pictures, she talks about the tragedy of Monroe’s death as well as Mr. Ledger’s, announcing that no comparisons hold. “I sure as hell wouldn’t let it happen to me,” she says.

Forbes speculates about the worth of the Lindsay Lohan Photos in New York Magazine.

Exactly how much is it worth to score exclusive nude photos of a hot celebrity? In the case of New York magazine’s Web site, more than $500,000 so far, at least on paper.

In the never-ending battle for exclusive celebrity photos, New York could boast an awfully big catch this week: exclusive shots of a nude Lindsay Lohan recreating the legendary final photo shoot of the late Marilyn Monroe.

The photographer who snapped the photos of Lohan was Bert Stern, the same lensman who was behind the camera for Monroe’s famed 1962 shoot at the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles. And while some magazines reportedly spend millions to get their hands on exclusive photos of celebrities or their babies, New York paid Stern its standard fee for such assignments–and paid Lohan nothing for her participation, according to magazine spokeswoman Lauren Starke.

The Feb. 25 edition of the weekly magazine, with Lohan on the front cover, hit newsstands on Monday. That same morning, the magazine posted the photo portfolio on its NYmag.com Web site.

For a site that’s averaged around a million page views a day lately, the results were stunning. NYmag.com recorded a total of more than 40 million page views Monday and Tuesday, more than 34 million of which came from the Lohan portfolio, Starke said.