The Online Photographer: Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 9

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, a rerun of ten popular posts from the early 2000s—brief discussions of ten great photographs, counting down from number 10.]

Andy Warhol [from Gene Korman], Marilyn, 1967

The Image of Woman

This is not, properly speaking, "just" a photograph. It only started out as one.

When Eugene Kornman, a.k.a. Gene Korman, took his photograph of Marilyn Monroe in 1953 as a publicity still for the film Niagara (left), he'd been doing stills on movie sets at least since Scarface more than 20 years earlier. Korman seems to have done well in Hollywood as a glamor photographer, if perhaps of the second rank—for one thing, he had created more artistically confident and stylish portraits of Monroe. Korman's daughters were child actors in the famous "Our Gang" and "Little Rascals" silent films. His younger daughter Mildred changed her name, too, just like Marilyn had—as "Ricki Van Dusen," she became of one of the top fashion models of the '50s, modeling for the likes of Irving Penn, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, John Rawlings, and Horst P. Horst (that's Ricki on the Vogue cover.)

After Marilyn's death, the self-styled Pop Art superstar Andy Warhol (who was also a photographer) "used" Korman's image—according to Mildred he never paid Korman or his estate for its use, or even asked for permission—to "mass-produce" (Warhol's term) an ever-changing series of silkscreens. They had numerous different combinations of fauvist-style patches of wild color over a simplified Kodalith of Monroe's face, copied, of course, from Korman's photograph. They are shown and sold as either individual silkscreens (one of which, known as "Orange Marilyn," sold for $17.3 million in 1998, which a Sotheby's spokesman called "a wise buy at the price") or as "paintings" composed of a number of the silkscreens (from two up to at least 50) grouped together.

Is the resulting artwork still at all Korman's? Is it still at all a photograph? Is it a collaboration? An unwitting or unwilling collaboration? A one-way collaboration? Was the photograph just raw material, like unformed clay? I'm a bit prickly about this, and often find myself standing up for the photograph's contribution to hybrid works of art. But I don't think it matters what we think: like it or not, it is undeniably a characteristic of photography that photographs are appropriated, copied, or adapted for an endless array of purposes by all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. At what point they stop being photographs is not a determination we can really come to. The Marilyn image(s) wouldn't be great without Warhol's admittedly larger contribution. It also wouldn't exist without Korman's smaller one.

[Mild nudity beyond the break. Warning provided as a courtesy for schools and workplaces. —Ed.]

What I like most about the Korman/Warhol Marilyns is how fantastically layered with implication they are. It's one of the two or three best-known images of perhaps the quintessential (at least in America) pop icon, yet it has no single form. Marilyn was many things—an enigma, a sex goddess, a star, almost the embodiment of the objectification of women through imagemaking. Males are by nature stimulated visually, by what Howe Gelb called, in one of his songs, "The shape of a woman / Temptation of egg." This instinct for visual attraction transfers its object readily to photographs, and male interest in pictures of women runs the gamut from the chaste admiration of innocent beauty to exploitative salaciousness. Regarding the latter, of course, it's photography's dirty little non-secret that one of the masters it serves is the porn industry. Pornography is a loaded subject almost by definition, and has been largely ignored as a photographic genre.

But here's where it gets interesting. If men's biologically programmed fate is to be attracted, women's is to attract—and so at the other end of the spectrum from straight raw grinding unadorned porn you have the rarefied imagery and impossible elegance of the fashion industry. And in between, every sort of representation of women as objects of desire: cheery girl-next-door catalogue models, swimsuit pictures, boudoir photography, Victoria's Secret ads, "nice" or artistic nudes—even, I think, a furtive subcategory of art photography that is essentially pornography disguised. And more.

Women have undoubtedly been affected by this, and not always in a good way. Neither Warhol's Marilyns nor Marilyn herself caused anything, of course, but for me the Marilyn Monroe phenomenon (remember, she was Playboy's first centerfold, against all that deep red) does mark a turning point. There have always been sex symbols. But Mae West, for one, was not even particularly beautiful—it's very difficult to imagine her as a fashion model. Consider too that most of the top fashion models in the 1950s were confident, mature women in their 30s, in contrast to, say, the waifish pseudo-adolescent "heroin chic" persona of Kate Moss in the '90s. Earlier than Warhol's Marilyn in 1967, actresses with strong but not conventionally beautiful faces were still playing romantic leads in films into middle age. By the time Sports Illustrated began remaking (again) the popular fashion in female body types in its swimsuit issues, culture was being flooded by images, and more and more emphasis was being placed on looks alone.

Women were objectified before she came along, and personality and talent could trump looks after she passed away. But I think a case could be made for Marilyn being the fulcrum—let's put it that way—the axis upon which the teeter-totter teetered. A few decades later, a poster of Farrah Fawcett (right) became the best-selling wall decoration in history—during the one year she earned $5,000 an episode for the TV show "Charlie's Angels" she earned $400,000 from that poster—yet Farrah herself would later claim she "didn't like" her world-famous hair and never felt secure about her body. It was as if whoever was on the other side of the teeter-totter had jumped off.

It's gotta take real confidence—courage, even—to buck that pressure, as Jamie Lee Curtis did at age 43 when she told MORE magazine that "glam" Jamie would only pose if "real" Jamie got equal time. So the editors, bowing to her insistence, ran a plain un-Photoshopped full-length portrait of a grinning Jamie in her underwear. Curtis didn't want forty-something women thinking she was perfect under the makeup.

Marilyn Monroe's whole self seemed dedicated to "image" virtually unto an illusion. She didn't keep the name she was born with, the color of her hair, a discernable personality, or her husbands (although Joe DiMaggio put flowers on her grave until the end of his life, and of course it's possible she would have found her personality if she'd lived long enough, like Candice Bergen did). She didn't even get to keep her own tribute song: Elton John wrote "Candle in the Wind" for her, but then later re-cast it for Diana, Princess of Wales. (Sorry, Norma Jean. The young man in the twenty-second row is now a gay millionaire soccer team owner…and, quite coincidentally, also a major photography collector.) But as other pinups have faded into the mists of the past, Marilyn's star still shines bright. Perhaps that has something to do with the almost alarming extent to which she subsumed herself into her image.

There is a nifty web site on which you can play around putting your own colors onto a Warhol Marilyn, to "see how the color affects the mood." Maybe it's fitting that the woman who personifies not the image of woman but rather woman-as-image should be immortalized in a flattened, simplified form and in relentless repetition, with a kaleidoscope of odd added colors transforming the "mood" of her face again and again. The simple, honest photograph alone must have been too real. It was certainly way too plain.

—Originally published in 2006. After this article was published I had fascinating phone conversation with Mildred Kornman, AKA Ricki Van Dusen, about her and her father Gene. She's 93 now. But I'll have to tell you about that another time.

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(Very sorry, but there are no comments this week—I’m not allowed to read or look at screen for more than a very short time.)