The above picture of Marilyn Monroe is entitled “Marilyn Monroe and the Camera.” This picture was taken during an interview with Georges Belmont in 1960. The picture is intended to show several different and contrasting sides of Monroe: glamorous juxtaposed against girl-next-door, sexy juxtaposed against serious, carefree juxtaposed against caring. The picture was an instant hit and eventually became a popular poster.

In 1967, Andy Warhol took this image and reworked it into an original piece of art. He repurposed the picture through his signature mark of repeating the image multiple times and changing the color scheme in drastic and strongly contrasting ways. The final products are the second and third images that you see. In the second picture, Monroe’s image is duplicated nine times, with each image exactly the same except for the color scheme. Each of the nine pictures contrast both within itself through the colors of the background, Monroe’s hair, and Monroe’s skin and also contrasts against each other, as the colors of adjacent pictures differ sharply. To accentuate the intra-picture contrast, the third picture is a larger picture of the bottom right square of the second picture.

The final picture is the one I have reworked on my own. I used Microsoft Powerpoint to manipulate the color contrast and comparative sizing of the picture. In this effort, I tried to mimic Warhol to a large extent because the contrasts he develops are very aesthetically pleasing. Furthermore, I think the contrasts excellently show how the same image can be seen in a variety of ways through a variety of lenses. Along these lines, I wanted to create a sharp contrast between the light and the dark to emphasize Monroe’s salient features such as the curls in her hair, her eyebrows, and her lips, but I did not want to inject color as that would become too similar to Warhol’s work and would likely dilute the contrast I was aiming for. The final picture is my end result.