Marilyn Stafford

Stafford was born Marilyn Gerson[10] in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.[3][11]

At age seven she was selected to train to be an actor with the Cleveland Play House.[6] Later she moved to New York City to act and had small roles Off-Broadway[5][11] and in early television.[12][6]

In 1948, Stafford went with friends interviewing Albert Einstein for a documentary film. In the car they handed her a 35mm camera—she had never used one before—and gave her a quick lesson on how to use it. She took several photographs and gave the film to her friends, who sent her a couple of prints.[13][3][12] In order to gain experience in photography, she worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo.[12]

In December 1948[11] she joined a friend in moving to Paris.[12] For a short while she sang with an ensemble at Chez Carrère, a dinner club off the Champs-Élysées.[4] There she met and became friends with the war photographer and photojournalist Robert Capa.[5] She carried a camera and took what she later described as "happy snaps", but, working as a singer, had no thought of becoming a professional photographer until she lost her voice and could not continue singing.[13] She asked Capa for advice on becoming a photographer; he suggested war photography, but this did not appeal to her. Her friend the writer Mulk Raj Anand introduced her to another photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who she also became friends with.[5] Cartier-Bresson encouraged her to take photographs on the streets of Paris,[4] so she took buses to the end of the line and made photos such as of children (some candid, some not) in the slum of Cité Lesage-Bullourde (near Place de la Bastille, and since cleared to make way for Opéra Bastille); and in the neighbourhood of Boulogne-Billancourt,[4][3] in 1950.[14] In 1956 she married Robin Stafford, a British foreign correspondent for the Daily Express working in Paris.[10] In 1958, whilst five or six months pregnant with their daughter,[12] Stafford went on a personal assignment to Tunisia to document and publicise the plight of Algerian refugees fleeing France's scorched earth aerial bombardment in the Algerian War.[11] Back in Paris she showed the pictures to Cartier-Bresson, who made a selection and sent them to The Observer, which published two on its front page.[4][3]

In Paris Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer for a public relations agency, photographing various types of clothing.[15]^: 37 Fashion photography of haute couture (custom-fitted) clothing at that time was normally modelled in opulent surroundings so as to convey a sense of luxury. In photographing the new ready-to-wear clothing of the time, Stafford instead took a documentary approach, photographing models out in the streets, suggesting more down-to-earth situations.[3]

In the late 1950s her husband's work sent the couple to Rome,[14] then in the early 1960s to Beirut for over a year. Stafford travelled extensively in Lebanon, photographing people and places, later collected in her book Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey through Lebanon in the Sixties (1998).[16]

Stafford and her husband separated.[10] In the mid-1960s she moved to London, working as a photographer in various roles. She worked freelance as an international photojournalist for The Observer on both commissions and self-assigned projects,[3] one of few women photographers working for national newspapers at that time.[11] In 1972 she spent a month photographing Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India.[17][18] She worked as a stills photographer on feature films and commercials, including on All Neat in Black Stockings (1969).[19]

Throughout her career she has made portraits, including those of Cartier-Bresson, Edith Piaf,[4] Italo Calvino, Le Corbusier, Renato Guttuso, Carlo Levi, Sharon Tate, Donovan, Christopher Logue, Lee Marvin,[20] Joanna Lumley, David Frost, Sir Richard Attenborough, Sir Alan Bates, and Twiggy.[21]

Since 2017 she has lived in West Sussex, England.[3][12]

The Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award was launched on International Women’s Day 2017. It is to be granted annually to a professional woman photographer working on a documentary photo essay which addresses a social, environmental, economic or cultural issue. The winner receives £1000 and mentoring by Stafford and FotoDocument, an organisation that uses documentary photography to draw attention to positive social and environmental activity.[22][23]

The 2017 winner was Rebecca Conway, with honorable mentions for Ranita Roy, Monique Jaques, and Lynda Gonzalez.[24]

The 2018 winner was Özge Sebzeci and the runners up were Mary Turner and Simona Ghizzoni.[25]

The 2019 winner was Anna Filipova.[26]

The 2021 winner was Isadora Romero and the runner up was Stefanie Silber.[27][28]

• Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey through Lebanon in the Sixties. London: Saqi, 1998. ISBN 978-0-86356-099-6. With a preface by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, "Marilyn Stafford's Theatre of the Unexpected".
• Stories in Pictures: A Photographic Memoir 1950. Shoreham, UK: Shoreham Wordfest, 2014. ISBN 978-0-9930446-0-1. With a foreword by Simon Brett and an introduction by Nina Emett. Edition of 50 copies.
  • Second edition. Shoreham, UK: Shoreham Wordfest, 2016. Edition of 100 copies. ISBN 978-0-9930446-0-1.
• Photographic Memories – Lost Corners of Paris: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, 1949-1954. 2017. Texts in English and French by Julia Winckler and Adrienne Chambon, photographs by Stafford. Exhibition catalogue.[n 1][14]
• Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography. Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2021. ISBN 9781908457707.[29]

• Indira and Her India, Nehru Centre, London, November 2013.[6][17][18]
• Arundel Museum, Arundel, UK, December 2013.[6] A retrospective of work from the 1940s to 1960s.[21]
• Photographic Memories of Lost Spaces: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949-1954, Alliance Française de Toronto, Toronto, Canada, March 2017. Curated by Julia Winckler.[7][30][31][32][33]
• Marilyn Stafford - Stories in Pictures 1950-60, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK, May–June 2017;[3][11][34][35] Art Bermondsey Project Space, London, June–July 2017.[4][36]
• Silent Echoes – Portraits from the Archive, After Nyne Gallery, London, October 2018. Curated by Nina Emett.[37]
• Marilyn Stafford – Fashion Retrospective 1950s-1980s, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK, 27 October – 17 November 2018.[38][39]
• A Life in Photography, Farleys House, East Sussex, August–October 2021[8][40]
• Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Brighton and Hove, 22 February – 8 May 2022[9][41][42]

• I Shot Einstein (2016) – eight-minute documentary film about Stafford, directed by Daniel Ifans[43][n 2] and Merass Sadek, produced by We Are Tilt.[n 3][44] Shown at the Artemis Women In Action Film Festival 2017 (Santa Monica, CA);[45] Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival 2017 (Middlebury, VT);[46] FilmBath 2017 (Bath, UK);[47] Paris Lift-Off Festival Online 2017;[48] Ethnografilm 2018 (Paris, France);[49] Cine-City 2017 (Brighton, UK);[50] Cleveland International Film Festival 2017 (Cleveland, Ohio).[51]

• 2020: Chairman's Lifetime Achievement Award 2019, UK Picture Editors' Guild Awards, London[52]

Stafford's work is held in the following permanent collection:

• The British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London: 5 items[53]

• Official website
• Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award
• Marilyn Stafford at IMDb
• "The fashion photography of Marilyn Stafford - in pictures" in The Guardian