The internet is full of photoshopped pictures of Marilyn. How do you tell which are real and which are fake? And why are photoshopped pictures so harmful both to Marilyn’s legacy and to her fans?
Why are Marilyn photoshops so damaging?
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.
Marilyn Monroe was intensely involved in how her image was presented to the public. In the picture above, you can see how Marilyn has drawn over photos she did not want published. She had a clause in her contract that she had approval over which photos could be published and which could not, and would often cross out the ones she didn’t like with a grease pencil, cut them into pieces, or shred them with a safety pin so they couldn’t be published without her permission. One can not imagine that she would be happy with having her head cut off and attached to another woman’s body.
Art is, of course, subjective. However, it takes a great stretch of the imagination to call using a computer to attach a head to another body as ‘art’, particularly when the intent is specifically to trick people into believing that the photo is genuine.
Make sure to check if the photo is real……
…..before you do this.
Examples of fake pictures
Here is a small sampling of some of the photoshopped images that circulate online most frequently. For a complete gallery of photoshopped pictures, please visit ImmortalMarilyn.com, where we have a team of Marilyn photo experts deconstructing fake images.
Photoshopped People
Ever wish Marilyn actually met Elvis? Or hung out with James Dean? Even though those events never happened, photoshopping makes a false history and narrative for their lives.
Making it more than it is….
There are only three existing pictures of Marilyn and John Kennedy in the same frame of a photo. None are remotely intimate, in all three of the pictures they are both surrounded by crowds of people. Since that’s obviously not salacious enough to fit with a narrative people want to believe, they just make up their own photos to illustrate something that didn’t happen.
Marilyn….on Marilyn?
One of the more baffling trends in Marilyn photoshops is to put Marilyn’s face from one photo onto Marilyn’s body from another photo. Some of these have even been used on officially licensed products. What on earth is the point? There are literally thousands of photos of Marilyn to choose from, why smash two together?
Your help needed!
While our team of photo experts is great at finding the original photos used in the mashed up pictures, these two have had us stumped. We can’t find the original bodies used. Do you recognize the bodies that Marilyn’s head was photoshopped onto? Please let us know!
By Marijane Gray
