Marilyn Stafford

Marilyn Jean Stafford (née Gerson; 5 November 1925 – 2 January 2023) was a British photographer.

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.

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.

Stafford was born Marilyn Gerson on 5 November 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Cartier-Bresson encouraged her to take photographs on the streets of Paris, 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, in 1950.

In the late 1950s her husband's work sent the couple to Rome, then in the early 1960s to Beirut for over a year.

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 in the streets, suggesting more down-to-earth situations.

After a marriage to filmmaker Joseph Kohn ended in divorce, she married Robin Stafford in 1958.

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.

They had a daughter, Lina Clerke, and divorced in 1965.

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, Sir Richard Attenborough, Sir Alan Bates, and Twiggy.

Stafford was married three times.

In 1972 she spent a month photographing Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India.

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; Arundel Museum; Alliance Française de Toronto; Art Bermondsey Project Space; Farleys House, East Sussex; and a retrospective at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in 2022.

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.

Stefford married João Manuel Viera in 2001, and they were together until his death in 2016.

In 2020 she was awarded the Chairman's Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Picture Editors' Guild Awards in London.