Photographer Richard Corman met Madonna in the summer of 1982.

As he tells the story, “My mother was casting The Last Temptation of Christ for Martin Scorsese and called me to say they had just tested a girl for the part of the Virgin Mary. She said, ‘You must meet this girl -- she’s an original.’

“I was 28 and had just finished an apprenticeship with Richard Avedon and was looking for interesting people to shoot. So I got this girl’s number and called. It was Madonna.”

Richard took this shot on a Manhattan rooftop later that year. Madonna was being considered for a movie based on the Cinderella fairy tale, and Richard photographed some audition shots. The film was never made.

This Out magazine cover shot was taken by photographer Richard Corman in 1982, a year before Madonna shot to superstardom. The shot was taken from the bathroom of her brother’s Manhattan apartment. The cover headline read, “The Unseen Madonna.”

On their first outing in 1982, Madonna walked Richard Corman around her neighborhood, using anything she came across as a casual backdrop for an afternoon of shooting.

“I follower her around the Lower East Side,” says Richard. “She was so comfortable -- it was as if she was in her own backyard. “

After meeting Madonna for the first time in her Lower East Side apartment, Richard returned to her building a few days later to shoot her. She said, "You know, we should go up to the roof because I go up there with all the kids from the building."

“She was like the Pied Piper of the neighborhood -- they loved her,” Richard recalls. “They followed her, they danced with her, they sang with her. It was something they did on a daily basis, and it was remarkable. We just walked up and they gathered around. She put the boom box on -- it was her music, though I don’t remember which song -- and they just started dancing and singing.

“She was so alive and unpretentious. She was fierce, determined. Nothing was going to stop her.”

Richard Corman’s first shoot of Madonna started on the rooftop of her apartment building. “After we came down from her roof,” he recalls, “we walked through the neighborhood, laughing and chatting, stopping in front of a storefront, stopping in front of a senior citizen’s home and hanging out with the old folks. She just went right up to a bench and squeezed herself in between two old men without saying anything, and I started shooting.”

“That early period of the ’80s was amazing,” recalls photographer Richard Corman. “I was photographing Basquiat and Keith Haring, and just to be part of all that took your breath away. People were truly taking chances. It was just a different energy, and Madonna was the focal point for a lot of that.”

Here, Richard shot Madonna on a walk-around near her apartment in Alphabet City on New York’s’ Lower East Side.

Madonna suggested a first meeting with Richard Corman at her apartment in Alphabet City on New York’s Lower East Side. As recalls that day, “I had to call her from a phone booth across the street “because the neighborhood was full of drug dealers, and they didn’t let people just walk in and out. There was a group of kids outside the building, on the stoop, in the hallways, and when I said I was there for Madonna the seas parted.

“I looked up the staircase, and I saw this girl leaning over the edge of the banister, and even from three stories below I could see these catlike eyes just looking down. I knew at that moment that she had something special -- I really did. She had her best friend and neighbor, Martin, with her -- he later died of AIDS—and we sat and talked. She served me a cup of coffee on a silver tray with three pieces of Bazooka bubblegum.”

Madonna was cast to appear in the 1985 film, “Vision Quest,” a coming of age drama about a high school wrestler starring Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino.

She handled her own make-up.