Marilyn Stafford

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Marilyn Stafford
in the Lebanon in 1960
Born
Marilyn Jean Gerson

(1925-11-05)5 November 1925
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Died2 January 2023(2023-01-02) (aged 97)
Shoreham-by-Sea, England
OccupationPhotographer
Years active1948–2022
Spouses
  • Joseph Kohn
    ​
    (divorced)​
  • Robin Stafford
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1958; div. 1965)​
  • João Manuel Viera
    ​
    ​
    (m. 2001; died 2016)​
Children1

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[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

  • 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[edit]

  • 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]

Solo exhibitions[edit]

Films[edit]

  • 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[edit]

Collections[edit]

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

Notes[edit]

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

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "Marilyn Stafford obituary". The Guardian. 5 January 2023. Retrieved 5 January 2023.
  2. ^ Willsher, Kim (4 December 2017). "How a chance meeting with Einstein led to the accidental start of a unique photography career". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  3. ^ Solomon, Saskia (1 December 2019). "A veteran photojournalist reflects on her itinerant career". The Caravan. Retrieved 7 December 2019.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Thorpe, Vanessa (30 April 2017). "The photographer who captured a time of change". The Observer. London. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h Whitmore, Greg (29 April 2017). "The chic and the shabby: Paris in the 1950s by Marilyn Stafford". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  6. ^ a b c d "Marilyn Stafford – Stories in Pictures 1950-60". International Times. 27 April 2017. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  7. ^ a b c d e f "Photo-journalist's portraits go on show". Shoreham Herald. Shoreham-by-Sea. 1 December 2013. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  8. ^ a b "Photographic memories of lost spaces : The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949-1954" Alliance Française de Toronto. Accessed 1 June 2017
  9. ^ a b Jones, Jonathan (20 August 2021). "Yoko Ono's broken pottery and the fragility of love – the week in art". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 August 2021.
  10. ^ a b Solomon, Saskia (22 February 2022). "From Einstein to Couture, This 96-Year-Old Captured It All". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
  11. ^ a b c "Robin Stafford, Journalist – Obituary". The Daily Telegraph. London. 2 January 2017. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  12. ^ a b c d e f "Lucy Bell Gallery exhibits works by photo-journalist Marilyn Stafford" ArtDaily, 11 May 2017. Accessed 30 May 2017
  13. ^ "Marilyn Gerson". Ohio, U.S., Birth Index, 1908–1998. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  14. ^ a b c d e f Gilson, Edwin (21 April 2017). "The extraordinary life of photographer Marilyn Stafford". The Argus (Brighton).
  15. ^ a b Willsher, Kim (3 January 2018). "Marilyn Stafford's best photograph: Albert Einstein in his lounge (interview)". The Guardian.
  16. ^ a b c Julia Winckler (2017). Photographic Memories – Lost Corners of Paris: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt (PDF). Alliance Française de Toronto or Julia Winckler.
  17. ^ Marilyn Stafford (2014). Stories in Pictures: A Photographic Memoir 1950. Shoreham Wordfest. ISBN 978-0-9930446-0-1.
  18. ^ Børre Ludvigsen (26 November 1998). "Marilyn Stafford: Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey through Lebanon in the Sixties". Al Mashriq. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  19. ^ a b "On the occasion of Indira Gandhi Birth Anniversary TNC Presents: Exhibition: Indira and Her India- India Remembere 1971 to 1981 - Marilyn Stafford" Nehru Centre, London. Accessed 30 May 2017
  20. ^ a b "Madam and Marilyn: access all areas". The Telegraph (Calcutta). Calcutta. 24 November 2013. Archived from the original on 27 June 2014. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  21. ^ "All Neat in Black Stockings (1969)" IMDb. Accessed 31 May 2017
  22. ^ a b "A glimpse into history at Arundel Museum's exhibit". Littlehampton Gazette. Littlehampton. 19 December 2013. Retrieved 1 June 2017.
  23. ^ "'Einstein was smiling at me!' Photographer Marilyn Stafford, 96, on celebrities, slums – and breakfast with Edith Piaf". The Guardian. 8 March 2022. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  24. ^ "Portraits". marilynstaffordphotography.com. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  25. ^ a b c d Williams, Alex (24 January 2023). "Marilyn Stafford, a Photojournalist Rediscovered, Dies at 97". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 January 2023.
  26. ^ Fairclough, Steve (8 March 2022). "Marilyn Stafford 2022 FotoReportage Award opens". Amateur Photographer. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  27. ^ "Winner of Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2022 – FotoDocument". Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  28. ^ "FotoReportage Award" FotoDocument. Accessed 31 May 2017
  29. ^ "Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award in association with FotoDocument" Photoworks, 9 March 2017. Accessed 1 June 2017
  30. ^ "Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award Winner" FotoDocument, 16 June 2017. Accessed 19 June 2017
  31. ^ "2018 FotoAward Winners Announced / Rebecca Conway 'Valley of the Shadow' launch". FotoDocument. Retrieved 13 July 2018.
  32. ^ Carey, Louise (11 March 2020). "Winner of the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award announced". digitalcameraworld. Retrieved 13 March 2020.
  33. ^ "Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2021 Winner – FotoDocument". FotoDocument. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  34. ^ "Marilyn Stafford documentary award winners announced". Amateur Photographer. 7 July 2021. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
  35. ^ "A Russian Sami smokes some fish: Natalya Saprunova's best photograph". The Guardian. 20 July 2022. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  36. ^ "Paris, Beirut, Delhi … Marilyn Stafford's globe-straddling photography – in pictures". The Guardian. 2 November 2021. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 15 February 2022.
  37. ^ Julia Winckler (25 April 2017). "Marilyn Stafford, Alliance Francaise". Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  38. ^ Mouch, Lila (13 March 2017). "Pour que les enfants du Paris de l'après-guerre ne soient plus "invisibles"". L'Express (Toronto). Toronto. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  39. ^ Mouch, Lila (3 April 2017). "Quand les rues du Ward appartenaient aux enfants". L'Express (Toronto). Toronto. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  40. ^ "Exposition de photos rares de la photographe américaine Marylin Stafford". CBC.ca. 7 March 2017. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  41. ^ "Marilyn Stafford - Stories in Pictures 1950-60: 6th May - 24th June 2017" Lucy Bell Fine Art. Accessed 30 May 2017
  42. ^ "Marilyn Stafford - Stories In Pictures 1950-1960". The List. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  43. ^ "Marilyn Stafford: Stories in Pictures 1950 – 1960: June 27 @ 11:00 am - July 8 @ 6:00 pm". Art Bermondsey Project Space. Retrieved 3 August 2017.
  44. ^ "Exhibitions". After Nyne Gallery. Retrieved 18 October 2018.
  45. ^ Willsher, Kim (4 November 2018). "The big picture: prêt-à-porter on the gritty streets of Paris". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 November 2018.
  46. ^ "Marilyn Stafford - Fashion Retrospective - 1950s -1980s". Lucy Bell Gallery. Retrieved 5 November 2018.
  47. ^ "Retrospective exhibition of photographs by Marilyn Stafford opens at Farleys House & Gallery". artdaily.com. Retrieved 21 August 2021.
  48. ^ "First-ever Marilyn Stafford retrospective opens". Amateur Photographer. 22 February 2022.
  49. ^ "96-year-old 'accidental' photographer in major new Brighton exhibition". 22 February 2022.
  50. ^ "Retrospective of 'one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century', Marilyn Stafford". OnTheWight. 27 May 2022. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  51. ^ "2017 Streaming Schedule - Artemis Women in Action Film Festival". Artemis Women In Action Film Festival. Retrieved 1 June 2017.
  52. ^ "2017 Festival Schedule". Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
  53. ^ "2017 Schedule - Visages Villages". FilmBath. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
  54. ^ "Paris Lift-Off Online 2017". Lift-Off Festivals. Retrieved 1 November 2017.
  55. ^ "Past Festivals". Ethnografilm Paris. Retrieved 1 November 2018.
  56. ^ "Brighton Screenings Documentary". Cine-city. Retrieved 1 November 2017.
  57. ^ "I Shot Einstein - BUNGAROOSH - Cleveland International Film Festival :: March 27 - April 7, 2019". www.clevelandfilm.org. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  58. ^ "Winners! UK Picture Editors' Guild Awards - see the winning images - view the event". UK Picture Editors' Guild. 10 March 2020. Retrieved 13 March 2020.
  59. ^ "RIBA Architecture Image Library". RIBAPix. Royal Institute of British Architects. Retrieved 3 June 2017.

External links[edit]

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