“I never wanted to be Marilyn—it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jean.”
A frail latticework extends over a face in black and white that we’ve seen a million times, casting a netted shadow, obscuring familiarity with precision. You want to squint, walk up, to it and cast it aside, but its fluidity is only an illusion—the veil is immovable, unable to be pierced. More of an armor than an invitation. It’s made up of the woman underneath, of thousands of photos of one of the most photographed people of all time: Marilyn Monroe.
Natalie Krick’s Marilyn Monroe installment of the Frye’s Boren Banner Series starts like this: with 2,600 photos of Marilyn Monroe from photographer Bert Stern’s The Complete Last Sitting, all taken for Vogue just six weeks before she died in 1962.
“Our generation is references on references,” Krick explains. And Marilyn Monroe is the best example of it. “I was realizing that so many famous women since her time have been photographed as Marilyn Monroe.”
Krick elaborates that she never set out to attach to Monroe, especially after a lifetime of being inundated with her image. But after a while, a new dimension to that exposure surfaced. “She’s so iconic, and it’s why I was so drawn to her,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about how women are sexualized in photographs, how our sexuality is posed and dressed up. I think it has to do with this idea that women aren’t sexual on their own—that you can’t be sexual on your own.”
The work makes you want to lean in and then zoom all the way out, out to yourself, out to the world, out to the idea of perception itself.
The first awareness of your own body as something beyond an obvious fact—like the sky or the weather—arrives as a surprise, despite itself. A few things happen: You become turned on, you get sick, you hurt yourself. It’s usually shocking but not entirely unwelcome. If you’re lucky, you have the space to explore this realization for yourself. I have a body. It is mine. It does things, wants things, is capable of things. It is fallible. It will end. It is here now.
Inevitably, the second awareness is that of other people’s awareness of your body. When you’re a girl, it’s often a crash landing into an entirely different world. A world where people see your body as collectible, as both an object to study and critique and one to possess. It often feels like the channel being changed in the middle of a show you were watching or the sun quickly going down on a day you thought was never-ending. There is no settling into this. You make your own veil and keep your true self for the people who see your multidimensionality. You can also play the losing game and chew yourself up before presentation, becoming as easy to digest as possible.
Stern, the photographer of The Complete Last Sitting, wrote an accompanying essay in the anthologized version of selects of those photos. His language is possessive, horrifying in its unflinching reflection of how Monroe and all women were digested through the lens and through the machine of public life. “It feels relevant, the way he sexualized her,” Krick reflects. “The way he made her into this seductive witch who enchanted him, who is also this tragic, one-dimensional person. It’s one of the reasons why I felt like I needed to work with those photographs. Thinking about how much those photographs are really about him.”
The photos are cut up, but the presence is enormous. “One of my rules for myself is that I wanted all the photos of Marilyn to be life-sized,” Krick says. “I think about the body and my body so much; that scale seems important to me for how people experience it.”
When confronted with Krick’s work, I wasn’t reminded of photography exhibitions. I was brought into the obsessive world of a painter’s muse. Artists like Édouard Manet and John Singer Sargent would spend years painting one woman, in different angles, under new light, capturing an expression in painstaking detail. Aware that their limited view would limit their ability to translate what they saw into a universal experience, fully immersed in their fate as a beholder. Rather than simplifying for ease of translation, it created a mania of communication, an outburst of creativity—the subjectivity and imperfection of the representation more relatable than the piece itself. Love and beauty intermingling frantically, unable to be replicated even in the same face.
This isn’t to say that Manet or Sargent weren’t reducing, say, Rosina Ferrara or Berthe Morisot into objects to be contained and captured. In many ways, all our expressions of one another are going to fall short. The difference is our ability to counter, to enter the conversation itself. Morisot, a prominent Impressionist herself, was able to say her piece with her 1885 Self-Portrait.
You could say that’s what Krick is doing with this—imagining Monroe’s self-portrait, hinting at her side of the conversation, putting the medium in her hands.
Monroe was never quite allowed to enter the conversation herself. Flattened into a brand after her life was flattened into a tragic campfire story, Monroe’s work as an artist was determinedly reduced to the very end of her life, to her beauty and desirability in only the most digestible of terms—sex appeal. It’s obvious in Stern’s writing about her, describing taking photos as making love, describing Monroe as basking in male attention, daydreaming about cutting her out of her dress.
Krick knows that “reclaiming” Monroe’s “truth” is none of her business, and presuming that it’s possible, or even that Monroe would want a public in her head, is counterproductive to what is left of her legacy. “I’m making her veil the way she spoke about it, making her into the photographer, into the person who views rather than is being viewed,” she says.
It’s a familiar, more urgent story even when scaled down, especially with photography as the prevalent medium for literal self-expression. There is a confusion between what is the veil and what is the fully realized self, with blemishes and smiles that change in different light, with quirks that take time to know, and a body that exists for ourselves to be shared on our terms. With a constant audience, it becomes difficult to know the difference between the simulacrum and the veil.
The texture in Krick’s piece reminds you of that tension—a veil as self-protection, an intricate piece, as something woven out of air and permeable. Her care in allowing space for Monroe to hide and to reveal is played not as coy, but as dynamic.
Working with photos both at a large scale and with extreme detail, cutting and manipulating the viewer to recognize the subject as belonging to herself and her own story, is staggering, a visceral reminder of how new photography is as a medium, and how limited our view of it can be as a way to convey human depth.
“I don’t really take pictures anymore, but for this, I took pictures of [Stern’s] pictures,” she says. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve made ‘portraits.’ I guess over the years, I’ve become more suspicious about portraiture. I love it—it’s not like I think it shouldn’t exist. But one of the reasons I started to use his work was because I was really upset about the way he wrote about her [in that book]. He frames her as this tragic figure, and that’s how she’s framed in our culture. I do see her death as tragic, but I don’t see her as tragic. She was an artist who doesn’t get what she deserves.”
Natalie Krick’s work will be on display at the Frye Art Museum as part of their Boren Banner Series beginning Wednesday, October 16. The museum will host their Fall 2024 Public Exhibitions Opening on Friday, October 25 at 7:30 pm.
