Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait

My fascination with Marilyn began in childhood, and it has never really left me. Part of what makes her such a compelling figure is how deliberately she protected her inner life, offering the world a luminous image while keeping the person behind it carefully out of reach. She is also just incredibly fabulous. So the prospect of unseen photographs felt like a rare gift.

The show was organized around the photographers she worked with, tracing how each collaboration shaped her and left its mark. There was a generosity to the curation, a willingness to show both sides of her, the performed and the unguarded, and I found myself learning things I hadn’t expected to, sitting with a version of her I hadn’t seen before.

I left emotional, though I’m still not entirely sure why. Whether it was grief for someone so talented lost so soon, or something more unsettled, a quiet feeling that I had been let into a space she would not have opened herself. She spent her life holding that door closed. The show was beautiful, and it deepened my admiration for her. But it also left me wondering whether what I’d witnessed was something she would have wanted us to see at all.