Since the 1980s Marilyn Minter has turned her exacting style to sensual subjects such as food, the female body, and the pornography industry. A critical backlash against her explicitly sexual work forced Minter to question the origin of the public’s discomfort with the body and sexuality. She was drawn toward ubiquitous, lascivious—yet not lewd— imagery in popular culture, especially in the fashion world. Minter at first set out to reinvigorate the tropes of fashion photography through fine art, but the juxtaposition of in-your-face beauty with down-and-dirty reality ultimately became her focus. She appropriates the vocabulary of fashion and beauty, and then mars the photoshopped flawlessness and color palette of contemporary advertising with sweat, spit, hair, and dirt. Marilyn Minter (b. 1948 Shreveport, Louisiana) received a BA in 1970 from the University of Florida at Gainesville and an MFA in 1972 from Syracuse University, New York. Lives in New York.