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Marilyn Stafford

British photographer (1925–2023) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marilyn Stafford
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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]

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Stafford published three books of photographs, Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey Through Lebanon in the Sixties (1998); Stories in Pictures: A Photographic Memoir 1950 (2014) of Paris in the 1950s; and Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography (2021). She had solo exhibitions at the Nehru Centre, London;[7] Arundel Museum;[7] Alliance Française de Toronto;[8] Art Bermondsey Project Space;[5] Farleys House, East Sussex;[9] and a retrospective at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in 2022.[10] In 2020 she was awarded the Chairman's Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Picture Editors' Guild Awards in London.

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Life and work

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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]

Throughout her career she has made portraits, including those of Cartier-Bresson, Edith Piaf, Italo Calvino, Le Corbusier, Renato Guttuso, Carlo Levi, Sharon Tate, Donovan, Christopher Logue, Lee Marvin, Joanna Lumley, David Frost, Sir Richard Attenborough, Sir Alan Bates, and Twiggy.[5][22][23][24]

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Personal life and death

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]

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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]
  • 2019: Anna Filipova[32]
  • 2021: Isadora Romero; runner up was Stefanie Silber[33][34]
  • 2022: Natalya Saprunova for Kildin, a Language for Russian Sámis Survivors[35]

Publications

  • 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.
  • 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. ISBN 9781908457707.[36]
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Solo exhibitions

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Films

  • 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]
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Awards

Collections

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

Notes

  1. [n 1]
    A PDF of the exhibition catalogue can be viewed here within the website of Julia Winckler.
  2. [n 2]
    As Dan Evans
  3. [n 3]
    The film can be viewed here at Vimeo

References

External links

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