For them he produced stories for major magazines including a day in the life of a woman doctor for McCall's, moody and revealing scenes from a Tokyo night club for Argosy men's magazine, a report on German war orphans for Redbook, a study of a disturbed boy's psychological rehabilitation and the story "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Controversy', both for Look,[6] in addition to making a portrait series of Albert Schweitzer in New York and covering a night fighter squadron's mission over Greenland.

He developed a reputation for putting himself at risk to get the eye-catching shot the magazine editors craved; parachuting with paratroopers, lying right in the path of stunt cars[9] and having himself tied to the periscope to photograph a submarine diving.

[14] An example is a wide angle shot of the corseted Monroe reflected in a mirror contains an out-of-focus self-portrait of the photographer holding a Nikon S2 fitted with 35mm lens, the rangefinder camera he customarily used and which was starting then to be adopted by picture magazines in America previously wary of Japanese equipment.

[15] Redbook asked him to repeat the exercise in 1957, and he accepted their assignment to photograph Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrier in Paris, again candidly, capturing their actions in dance rehearsals under difficult low-light conditions requiring shutter speeds of 1/15 sec.

He reports (in 2005) that Feingersh suffered depression between his bouts of frenetic activity, and in the years immediately after the Monroe shoot, and after a brief, failed marriage (1957) to Miriam (Mimi) Sakol (b.1933), he gave up photography.

Stein subsequently invited him to join him at Redbook as picture editor, but Feingersh soon succumbed to alcoholism, poor mental and physical health, neglected his work and died 'in his sleep' on the morning of June 21, 1961, at the home of friends in New York.

In 1987, 26 years after Ed Feingersh died, photography collector Michael Ochs uncovered a cache of several rolls of negatives and proofs that revealed the unpublished images from the Monroe series.