Taken by Philippe Halsman in 1954, this photo shows Marilyn sorting through prints from a recent collaboration, and deciding which shots to approve or discard. She took her image very seriously, and as Immortal Marilyn staffer Marijane Gray explains in a new Buzzfeed post, would most likely have taken a dim view of the Photoshopped images that now proliferate on social media.
“With the internet age comes technology used to fool people. Whether it’s a false headline or a photoshopped image, it serves no purpose other than to say ‘gotcha!’. Unfortunately for Marilyn fans, the last few years have shown a trend for creating images with Marilyn’s head or face photoshopped onto someone else’s body. What’s the harm in that? Not only is it incredibly disrespectful to Marilyn, who took pride in her body and worked hard on her figure, it’s disrespectful to the poor woman who’s had her head chopped off and replaced with Marilyn’s.
Photoshopping pictures of Marilyn are muddying the waters for newer generations of her fans. They’re putting in her in situations that never actually occurred, obscuring her history and her true self. They’re presenting an image of her that is completely false and if it continues in this fashion we may lose entirely who she really was.”