Picture this: You’ve never really used a camera before, but there you are, zipping along in a car bound for Princeton, N.J., from New York City to take a portrait of the most famous physicist in the world: Albert Einstein.
That’s exactly what happened to Marilyn Stafford, and it marked the beginning of her unusual career.
Now 96, Ms. Stafford worked as a photographer j for more than 50 years, in a career that took her to India, Bangladesh, Tunisia, London and Paris, capturing cutting-edge prêt-à-porter fashion; the realities of urban poverty; and the impact of conflict.
Her greatest skill was portraiture: the singer Édith Piaf, the writer Italo Calvino, the actress Sharon Tate and the architect Le Corbusier were among the many she shot with her Rolleiflex camera. And yet she never achieved the level of fame as her male counterparts, like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
A retrospective in England, where Ms. Stafford lives, has collected all these photographs for the first time. “Marilyn Stafford: A life In Photography” runs from Feb. 22 to May 8 at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (there is also an accompanying book). Together, Ms. Stafford’s photographs tell a vivid story of the 20th century. There are the changing fashions: in automobiles and clothing, skirts shortening to wisps, the appearance of décolletages, fishnets and stilettos.
Political shifts are captured, too, with images of crowds gathered before the first, and as yet only, female president of India, Indira Gandhi, on a visit in 1972 to Kashmir; and haunting portraits of Algerian refugees in Tunisia, displaced by the War of Independence, in 1958.
“I like to tell stories,” Ms. Stafford said. “And for me, taking a photograph is like telling a story. I tell it subconsciously, as I take the picture.”
She was born Marilyn Gerson in Cleveland in 1925, the only child of a pharmacist father and a mother who sold antiques. Her original ambition was to become an actress like Shirley Temple, and she took lessons at the Cleveland Play House, where the actors Paul Newman and Joel Gray also studied.
Ms. Stafford would later use what she learned — in particular the Stanislavski technique — to immerse herself in the world of her subjects, and disappear completely. She moved to New York in 1947 with the dream of making it on Broadway.
It was around this time that she also began experimenting with film. Largely self-taught, her technique was purposefully haphazard, and she used the Russian film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein’s motto to “shoot, shoot, shoot; cut, cut, cut.” She would often work through several rolls of film to home in on her subject and get “the one.”
Though much of her career was carved out through steely determination, Ms. Stafford’s encounter with Einstein was kismet. In 1948, Ms. Stafford, then 24, tagged along with a film crew seeking Einstein’s views on the atomic bomb after Hiroshima. On the drive from Manhattan to the physicist’s home in Princeton, she was handed a 35 millimeter camera and was informed she would be the “stills lady.”
The resulting portrait shows the wizened physicist in a spectral blur — a foggy ghostliness caused by the technical imprecision of a novice, but nevertheless possessing the unmistakable aesthetic that defines a Stafford photograph. After taking the photo, she no longer dreamed of a life before the camera, but, rather, behind it.
In 1949, following an apprenticeship with the New York fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, Ms. Stafford moved to Paris, where she would spend a decade. There, her love for photography deepened, and she befriended Édith Piaf, Eleanor Roosevelt,Noël Coward and Bing Crosby.
The writer Mulk Raj Anand, her good friend, introduced her to photography greats like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson, who became her mentors.
Ms. Stafford had a talent for creating an unfussy intimacy with her subjects. You see this with former Prime Minister Gandhi, with whom Ms. Stafford spent a month in 1972. It was a tumultuous period, during which Bangladesh was formed, and Ms. Stafford gained access to Ms. Gandhi’s home life, photographing her caring for her grandchildren and playing with her dog.
The series also captured Ms. Gandhi’s public persona: presenting a wounded soldier with a rose in hospital; receiving visitors in her garden; accepting marigold wreaths. “I found Indira to be very shy — we were shy with each other,” Ms. Stafford said.
She got along with extroverts too. Ms. Stafford recalled that halfway through her shoot with the famously rambunctious actor Lee Marvin, he kicked off his shoes and treated her to a spirited a cappella rendition of “Wand’rin’ Star” from his recent movie “Paint Your Wagon.” Ms. Stafford joined in.
Ms. Stafford was also born under a wandering star. Though she was a doting mother, Ms. Stafford felt domestic life was not for her. Relatives would care for Lina, her only child with her former husband, Robin Stafford, a British foreign correspondent with The Daily Express, when she was on monthlong assignments overseas. She thought, at the time, that it was the only way she could, as a single mother, fully commit to her art. She was a trailblazer, grabbing opportunities even when they led to uncomfortable situations.
In Paris she brought fashion to the street, when haute couture would normally remain in the studio, and she set clothes by Givenchy, Dior and Chanel against crude graffiti. In some photos, children gather, joining the fun; in Montmartre, a little girl perches moodily on a railing beside a model in ready-to-wear. The fashion editor of Le Figaro proclaimed Ms. Stafford “a reverse snob,” which amused her.
Theoverlooked poor areas of Paris, like the Cité Lesage-Bullourde, near the Bastille,also caught her attention, and she took joyful photographs of children tearing through the streets, dancing for the camera. In the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, she captured sadder scenes: rough sleepers, austere classrooms.
At the center of one of her favorite images a model spoofs fashion, posing before the Louvre in a fur coat, countenance pinched in an endearing grimace. This boldness is found in her later work as well.
In Uttar Pradesh, India, young girls sit cross-legged in a line, heads bent over the Quran; in Beirut, a 1960 beauty pageant contestant giggles at the lip of the stage, a short dress threatening to expose her underwear to the judges
A photo shot in Al-Kurah, Lebanon, shows an Orthodox priest in sunglasses standing before the Balamand Monastery. In another image, near the recently bombed village of Sakiet in Tunisia, an Algerian refugee nurses her newborn, the pair dressed in rags.
The Tunisian photographs resonate most with Ms. Stafford, who was six months pregnant at the time and incensed by the way “nobody seemed concerned about the refugee crisis that was unfolding,” she said. The image of mother and child landed Ms. Stafford her first front page in 1958, in the British newspaper The Observer. It drew comparisons to Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” — a full circle, because as a child Ms. Stafford had been captivated by Ms. Lange’s photographs of the Dust Bowl famine in Life magazine.
Ms. Stafford took great pride in that Observer feature, she said, especially because the paper subsequently “sent a journalist to Tunisia to write a story on the refugees, which drew further attention to their plight.” It restored her belief that photography can have a transformative impact on the world.
After Paris, came London, then stints in Lebanon and Rome. In London there were so few women on Fleet Street at the time that Ms. Stafford was well known among journalists. She quickly became acquainted with all the photo editors, shooting artists, writers and activists as they breezed through town, capturing the free-loving ambience of the swinging 1960s.
Following her divorce, and forever seeking adventure, Ms. Stafford spent the 1970s and early 1980s visiting India, photographing world heritage sites and the Adivasi-Ghotul Muria and Warli tribes. It was then that her photographs turned to color.
But it was in Bangladesh that she discovered the limits of her craft. While she managed to raise awareness of the struggles of rape victims in Dhaka, she found she couldn’t capture the horrific aftermath of the country’s Liberation War, when whole villages were destroyed. She left feeling helpless.
“I was not able to take the photograph I wanted to take,” she said. “The effect of the horror of war and genocide on the people couldn’t be translated onto film. The people there had a look in their eyes I will never forget. It is a photograph I could not get.”
When Ms. Stafford retired in the 1980s, after a decade of running a successful fashion photography agency, she kept her favorite images on display around her home in England’s South Coast — the refugee mother, the Louvre model — and stored the rest in cupboards and under beds. She developed new passions: adopting cats, learning Mandarin.
Today, Ms. Stafford continues to bring focus to the overlooked. In 2017, sensing a need to “do something” about the gender disparity in the field, she set up the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, sponsored by Nikon and facilitated by FotoDocument, an arts organization run by Nina Emmett. The award is meant to encourage international female photojournalists, and in March it will accept entries for its fifth installment.
Ms. Stafford played freely with photography’s possibilities, fooling around and creating “silly” pictures. But she also often dealt with difficult themes, and her body of work reflects her belief that photography, when used honestly, is a witness, a powerful record of the human experience.
