Marilyn Stafford

Stafford was born Marilyn Gerson in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

At age seven she was selected to train to be an actor with the Cleveland Play House. Later she moved to New York City to act and had small roles Off-Broadway and in early television.

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

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

In Paris Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer for a public relations agency, photographing various types of clothing. 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.

In the late 1950s her husband's work sent the couple to Rome, 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).

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

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, and Twiggy.

She now (2017) lives in West Sussex, England.

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.

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

• 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.

• Indira and Her India, Nehru Centre, London, November 2013.
• Arundel Museum, Arundel, UK, December 2013. A retrospective of work from the 1940s to 1960s.
• 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.
• Marilyn Stafford - Stories in Pictures 1950-60, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK, May–June 2017; Art Bermondsey Project Space, London, June–July 2017.

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

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

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