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Happy Birthday, Marylin!

Daria Addabbo, a documentary photographer, invited me to take part in her meta-reality photonovel Sotto il Sole, making me the protagonist and giving my character — and therefore me — a commission from a major newspaper: a visual homage to Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday in Palm Springs for their May 2026 issue. What began as a fictional assignment soon became a real photographic project, evolving into a full exploration of myth and illusion.

I used Palm Springs’ architecture as a metaphor for Marilyn herself: much like her public persona, the city stands as an emblem of the 1950s American Dream — gleaming on the surface with its manicured facades, locked gates, and eerily perfect mid-century homes, yet filled with a quiet, claustrophobic alienation underneath. Through hedges and fences, I captured glimpses of interiors — perfectly staged yet strangely vacant.

Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds echoed in my (and my character’s) mind as I worked — its critique of suburban conformity mirroring the tension between appearance and reality that defines both Monroe’s myth and Palm Springs’ illusion of perfection. She was sold to the world as the perfect, sexy, slightly naïve girl-next-door, yet behind that illusion was a woman of intelligence, complexity, and deep loneliness. The more I looked at Palm Springs, the more it reflected this duality — a beautiful mirage, a “deserted” city in the desert. That tension — between what we see and what remains hidden — became the core of my work.

With Happy Birthday, Marilyn!, I am not simply celebrating a myth or documenting a place. I am reconstructing and paying homage to the complexity of Marilyn’s character and her inner struggles — through objects, architecture, the tension between presence and absence, the sharp framing of the images, and the harsh, revealing light of the flash.

The following is the body of work I produced, which appears at the end of her book Sotto il Sole.