Dr Lois Banner - author of MM-Personal and the forthcoming Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox – has written an article for the Huffington Post exploring MM’s enduring fascination.
“As time goes by and thousands of photographs of her surface, taken by amateurs as well as esteemed professionals, we realize that Marilyn was indeed the major photographic model of the 20th century. Her nude photographs are unsurpassed in the genre of aesthetic nudes. She became dramatic and comic in turn in representations of her as a sad ballerina by Milton Greene, as an innocent geisha girl by Cecil Beaton, or as an Eve coming to life as a ‘leopard in the bulrushes’ by Eve Arnold. Above all, she lived a life beyond measure…
Marilyn created an image for the ages, in one of the great personal transformations of the American experience…The greatest screen personality since Greta Garbo, she could, like Garbo, project happiness and sadness in her eyes at the same time. Those eyes were mesmerizing; even today we easily fall under her spell. She is the child that is in all of us, the person we want to protect, as well as the sex goddess we want to possess.”
