Marilyn Stafford

Marilyn Stafford (born 1925) is a British photographer. She worked mainly as a freelance photojournalist based in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, then in London, travelling to Lebanon, Tunisia, India and elsewhere.^[1][2][3] 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.^[1]

Stafford has published two books of photographs, Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey Through Lebanon in the Sixties (1998), and Stories in Pictures: A Photographic Memoir 1950 (2014) of Paris in the 1950s. She has had solo exhibitions, some being a retrospective and some being of a single subject: Indira Gandhi, and Parisian slum children.

Life and work

Stafford was born Marilyn Gerson^[4] in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.^[1][5]

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^[3][5] and in early television.^[7][6]

In 1948, Stafford took her first portrait of Albert Einstein, for friends who were making a documentary film about him.^[1][7] In order to gain experience in photography, she worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo.^[7]

In December 1948^[5] she joined a friend in moving to Paris.^[7] For a short while she sang with an ensemble at Chez Carrère, a dinner club off the Champs-Élysées.^[2] There she met and became friends with the war photographer and photojournalist Robert Capa.^[3] Her friend the writer Mulk Raj Anand introduced her to another photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who she also became friends with.^[3] Cartier-Bresson encouraged her to take photographs on the streets of Paris,^[2] 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,^[2][1] in 1950.^[8] In 1956 she married Robin Stafford, a British foreign correspondent for the Daily Express working in Paris.^[4] In 1958, whilst five or six months pregnant with their daughter,^[7] 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.^[5] 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.^[2][1]

In Paris Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer for a public relations agency, photographing various types of clothing.^[9]: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.^[1]

In the late 1950s her husband's work sent the couple to Rome,^[8] then in the early 1960s to Beiruit 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).^[10]

Stafford and her husband separated.^[4] 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,^[1] one of few women photographers working for national newspapers at that time.^[5] In 1972 she spent a month photographing Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India.^[11][12] She worked as a stills photographer on feature films and commercials, including on All Neat in Black Stockings (1969).^[13]

Throughout her career she has made portraits, including those of Cartier-Bresson, Edith Piaf,^[2] Italo Calvino, Le Corbusier, Renato Guttuso, Carlo Levi, Sharon Tate, Donovan, Christopher Logue, Lee Marvin,^[14] Joanna Lumley, David Frost, and Twiggy.^[15]

She now (2017) lives in West Sussex, England.^[1][7]

Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award

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.^[16][17]

The 2017 winner was Rebecca Conway, with honorable mentions for Ranita Roy, Monique Jaques, and Lynda Gonzalez.^[18]

Publications by Stafford

• 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][8]}

Solo exhibitions

• Indira and Her India, Nehru Centre, London, November 2013.^[6][11][12]
• Arundel Museum, Arundel, UK, December 2013.^[6] A retrospective of work from the 1940s to 1960s.^[15]
• 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.^{[19][20][21][22][23]}
• Marilyn Stafford - Stories in Pictures 1950-60, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK, May–June 2017;^{[1][5][24][25]} Art Bermondsey Project Space, London, June–July 2017.^[2][26]

Film

• I Shot Einstein (2016) – eight-minute documentary film about Stafford, directed by Dan Evans and Merass Sadek, produced by Tilt.^{[n 2][27]} Shown at the 2017 Artemis Women In Action Film Festival, Santa Monica, CA.^[28]

Collection

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

• The British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London: 5 items^[29]

Notes

1. ↑ A PDF of the exhibition catalogue can be viewed here within the website of Julia Winckler.
2. ↑ The film can be viewed here at Vimeo

References

External links

• Official website
• Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award
• Marilyn Stafford on IMDb