Marilyn Everywhere

Twelve vintage photographs. Twelve historic venues. A woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe.

In the autumn of 2023, while working on the online fraud book The Scam Slayer, investigative journalist Stephan Grey receives an unexpected assignment from his editor: to investigate twelve silver gelatin prints from a private Swiss archive, depicting a blonde woman in historic venues across Hollywood, Atlantic City, Tokyo, New York, London, Paris, Florence, Bergamo, Venice, Milan, Naples and Rome.

On the verso of each print, a single word in pencil: the name of the city.

Grey, accustomed to dismantling scams, searches for inconsistencies, anachronisms, errors. The locations are real. The interiors match. The details hold. And the cities coincide with those of the MARILYN100 project, in which the artist Micheline Grisolame has reimagined one hundred masterpieces of Western painting with the face of Marilyn Monroe.

The photographs show the woman in the venues. Grisolame's works show her in the paintings. The cities are the same. The woman is the same. The connection is too precise to be a coincidence and too strange to be proof.

From Hollywood to Rome, from a poolside in California to a velvet sofa in Naples, Marilyn Everywhere is the story of an investigation that changes direction: the map of a presence suspended between the possible and the inexplicable.

An edition featuring The Savoy Hotel, London, on the cover.

This book is part of the MARILYN100™ project · marilyn100.com