Monica Lewinsky on Losing Her “Portrait Virginity” to Marilyn Minter

There was also something else that intrigued me about the idea of working with Marilyn: We’ve both been trashed by mainstream feminists. Marilyn calls herself a sex-positive feminist, but in the late ’80s and early ’90s, her Porn Grid paintings, which recreated pornographic images, were attacked as anti-feminist. As for me, well, I was thrown under the bus by prominent feminists in the late ’90s for a long list of reasons that we don’t need to go into right now.

Marilyn specializes in photorealism, and she actually begins her process by photographing her subject. When I arrived for the shoot in the fall of 2021, Marilyn and her husband, Bill Miller, greeted me warmly at the door. She photographed me behind a piece of glass encased in ice as it went through various stages of defrosting. The day was filled with music, laughter, and Marilyn’s disarming banter, which made me feel a little less self-conscious than usual. 

After shooting her subjects, Marilyn uses Photoshop to painstakingly combine and manipulate shots into a multilayered reference image. Then she takes enamel paint and slowly applies layer after layer onto a metal panel, in a process that can take months or even years. I have yet to see my portrait in person, but I’m looking forward to seeing myself through Marilyn’s eyes.