Marilyn Stafford
in the Lebanon in 1960
Born	Marilyn Jean Gerson (1925-11-05)5 November 1925 Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Died	2 January 2023(2023-01-02) (aged 97) Shoreham-by-Sea, England
Occupation	Photographer
Years active	1948–2022
Spouses	Joseph Kohn ​ (divorced)​ Robin Stafford ​ ​ (m. 1958; div. 1965)​ João Manuel Viera ​ ​ (m. 2001; died 2016)​
Children	1

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 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.

Life and work

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]}

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]

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]

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.
  • 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][16]}
• Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography. Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2021. ISBN 9781908457707.^[36]

Solo exhibitions

• Indira and Her India, Nehru Centre, London, 2013.^[7][19][20]
• 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]}
• Marilyn Stafford – Stories in Pictures 1950–60, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK, 2017;^{[4][12][41][42]} Art Bermondsey Project Space, London, 2017.^[5][43]
• Silent Echoes – Portraits from the Archive, After Nyne Gallery, London, 2018. Curated by Nina Emett.^[44]
• Marilyn Stafford – Fashion Retrospective 1950s–1980s, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK, 2018.^[45][46]
• A Life in Photography, Farleys House, East Sussex, 2021^[9][47]
• Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Brighton and Hove, 2022;^[10][48][49] Dimbola Museum and Galleries, Isle of Wight, 2022^[50]

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]

Awards

• 2020: Chairman's Lifetime Achievement Award 2019, UK Picture Editors' Guild Awards, London^[58]

Collections

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

• The British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London: 5 items^[59]

Notes

References

External links

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