Marilyn Jean Stafford (née Gerson; 5 November 1925 – 2 January 2023) was a British photographer.[1][2][3] Born and raised in the United States, she moved to Paris as a young woman, where she began working as a photojournalist. She settled in London, but travelled and worked across the world, including in Tunisia, India, and Lebanon.[4][5][6] Her work was published in The Observer and other newspapers. Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer in Paris, where she photographed models in the streets in everyday situations, rather than in the more usual opulent surroundings.[4]
Stafford was born Marilyn Gerson[11] on 5 November 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States.[4][12][13]
At age seven she was selected to train to be an actor with the Cleveland Play House.[7] Later she moved to New York City to act and had small roles Off-Broadway[6][12] and in early television.[14][7]
In 1948, Stafford went with friends interviewing Albert Einstein for a documentary film. In the car they handed her a 35 mm 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.[15][4][14] In order to gain experience in photography, she worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo.[14]
In December 1948[12] she joined a friend in moving to Paris.[14] For a short while she sang with an ensemble at Chez Carrère, a dinner club off the Champs-Élysées.[5] There she met and became friends with the war photographer and photojournalist Robert Capa.[6] 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.[15] 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.[6] Cartier-Bresson encouraged her to take photographs on the streets of Paris,[5] so she took buses to the end of the line and made photographs 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,[5][4] in 1950.[16] In 1956 she married Robin Stafford, a British foreign correspondent for the Daily Express working in Paris.[11] In 1958, whilst five or six months pregnant with their daughter,[14] 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.[12] 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.[5][4]
In Paris Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer for a public relations agency, photographing various types of clothing.[17]: 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 in the streets, suggesting more down-to-earth situations.[4]
In the late 1950s her husband's work sent the couple to Rome,[16] 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).[18]
Stafford and her husband separated.[11] 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,[4] one of few women photographers working for national newspapers at that time.[12] In 1972 she spent a month photographing Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India.[19][20] She worked as a stills photographer on feature films and commercials, including on All Neat in Black Stockings (1969).[21]
Stafford was married three times. After a marriage to filmmaker Joseph Kohn ended in divorce, she married Robin Stafford in 1958.[25] They had a daughter, Lina Clerke, and divorced in 1965.[25][26] Stefford married João Manuel Viera in 2001, and they were together until his death in 2016.[25]
In her later years, Stafford lived in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex.[4][14] She died at her home on 2 January 2023, at the age of 97.[1][25]
Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award
The Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award was launched on International Women's Day 2017. It is 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 £2000[27] (initially £1000) and mentoring by Stafford and FotoDocument, an organisation that uses documentary photography to draw attention to positive social and environmental activity.[28][29]
Winners
2017: Rebecca Conway; honorable mentions for Ranita Roy, Monique Jaques, and Lynda Gonzalez[30]
2018: Özge Sebzeci; runners up Mary Turner and Simona Ghizzoni[31]
Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey through Lebanon in the Sixties. London: Saqi, 1998. ISBN978-0-86356-099-6. 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. ISBN978-0-9930446-0-1. 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. ISBN978-0-9930446-0-1.
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][16]
Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography. Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2021. ISBN9781908457707.[36]
Arundel Museum, Arundel, UK, December 2013.[7] A retrospective of work from the 1940s to 1960s.[22]
Photographic Memories of Lost Spaces: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949–1954,Alliance Française de Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 2017. Curated by Julia Winckler.[8][37][38][39][40]
I Shot Einstein (2016) – eight-minute documentary film about Stafford, directed by Daniel Ifans[n 2] and Merass Sadek, produced by We Are Tilt.[n 3] Shown at the Artemis Women In Action Film Festival 2017 (Santa Monica, CA);[51] Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival 2017 (Middlebury, VT);[52] FilmBath 2017 (Bath, UK);[53] Paris Lift-Off Festival Online 2017;[54] Ethnografilm 2018 (Paris, France);[55] Cine-City 2017 (Brighton, UK);[56] Cleveland International Film Festival 2017 (Cleveland, Ohio).[57]
