Marilyn Stafford never meant to become a photographer. As she entered her nineties, her career was almost forgotten. Only a few images were on public display, with most of her prints and negatives stored in shoe boxes and bags under her bed.

Now — more than six decades after she took her first portrait, of Albert Einstein — fame has arrived at last for Stafford, at 96. A retrospective of her work is showing at Brighton Museum, a book has been published to accompany it, and an award for women photographers has been set up in her name.

Her career started almost by accident, in New York in 1948, when she helped out a friend making a documentary about Einstein.

She recalls: “I was with the crew on their way to get a quote from Einstein speaking out against the atomic bomb for a film they were making post-Hiroshima, and they suddenly informed me I was the ‘stills lady’.

“I had 10 minutes to learn how to use the camera in the back of the car. I wish I’d known more, as I’d have lit Einstein differently and captured more of the essence of him at home.”

It was the start of a career which took her from postwar New York and Paris to Tunisia, Rome, Lebanon, Swinging 60s London and war-torn Bangladesh, via portraits of 20th century icons as diverse as Indira Gandhi and Twiggy.

She took heartrending images of refugees but made her living mainly from fashion shoots, working for Vogue, among others.

“To me it was a job, I never thought of it as art,” says Stafford. Born Marilyn Gerson in Cleveland, Ohio in 1925, she grew up determined to have an acting career. Despite the Einstein portrait, showbusiness was still her main goal when she left New York for Paris in 1949. “I went as a tourist but stayed for 10 years.”

Edif Piaf in Paris in 1950

Edif Piaf in Paris in 1950 (MARILYNSTAFFORDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM)

An impresario who overheard her singing Happy Birthday in a restaurant invited to her to audition at the exclusive Chez Carrère dinner club, where she met Maurice Chevalier, Bing Crosby and Noel Coward, and Eleanor Roosevelt. To this day, she regrets not photographing her. “I missed the opportunity as I wasn’t a photographer yet,” she recalls.

After a fellow performer started a relationship with Edith Piaf, Stafford was often invited for after-gig breakfasts with the star, through whom she met Charles Aznavour. She went to the races with Bing Crosby. But when the late-night existence of a singer affected her health, she switched direction.

Her life changed when she was introduced to two of the greatest mid-century photographers of all time, Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the godfather of all street photographers, who took her out as a decoy to distract the subjects of the candid shots he was taking on the hoof by snapping them herself.

Twiggy

Sixties icon Twiggy photographed in London (MARILYNSTAFFORDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM)

Not long afterwards, she set up a partnership with a French fashion photographer to cover the new seasons’ looks. She was decades ahead of her time, taking the models away from the catwalk and photographing them in the street. What that setting had to offer was far more to her liking than fashion. There were not only the passers-by who found their way into the model shots, bringing them to life, but also the street children she snapped in her spare time in a slum behind the Bastille. That feeling for the plight of children and their mothers spurred her to travel to Tunisia to find refugees from the Algerian war of independence. She photographed displaced people, including a mother with her newborn when she was six months pregnant herself.

“The baby wanted to come early when I got home,” she recalls. That was her daughter, Lina Clerke, now a midwife who lives in Sussex, not far from her fiercely independent mother.
Lina had an eventful childhood. Marilyn’s husband, Robin Stafford, was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express. The family moved from Paris to Rome and then on to Lebanon. Later, they separated and mother and daughter moved to London, but often visited her parents in Ohio.

“I remember them speaking Yiddish, and my grandmother’s matzo ball soup,” says Clerke, co-curator of the Brighton show with Nina Emett, another documentary image-maker who brought Stafford back to prominence after viewing the thousands of images she had stored under her bed and forgotten about for decades.

“When I stopped work in 1980 I put everything into envelopes, bags and shoe boxes under the bed, where they were discovered 30 years later,” says Stafford. “My life is based on serendipity. I met Nina Emett, who has an organisation called FotoDocument, and when I saw these huge photographs all over Brighton I realised these were the kind of stories I had been telling 40 years ago.

“We met and became close friends, and it was Nina who looked through all these bags and boxes and said: ‘This stuff ought to be shown’. It is through her work that Ba group has been formed to promote my photography.”

What took her to Britain, in the first place? “Cartier-Bresson had sent my pictures of the Algerian refugees to the Observer, where they ended up on the front page, and London was a place where I could get work,” says Stafford, who came to the capital when Twiggy and Joanna Lumley were making their mark as models.

She photographed many other stars of the 60s, including Albert Finney, Alan Bates, John Osborne and Richard Attenborough. After spending more than a month in India in the 1970s with Indira Gandhi, to document her support of another war of independence — this time in Bangladesh, where she stayed on to record images of rape victims — Stafford turned down a staff job on an international fashion newspaper. “I could not face living in the fashion world full-time after what I had witnessed in Bangladesh,” she explains.

She quit photography in 1980. “I retired so I could do other things,” she says, recalling filming a series of videos for children in UK immigrant communities with a grant from the Racial Equality Commission.
“The aim was to show the common humanity of all people, despite different backgrounds.”

She never lost her love of story-telling through pictures, nor her belief that documenting the suffering of her subjects could help.

Having set up an annual award for those following in her footsteps in 2017 with the help of Emett, she is this month inviting entries for a £2,000 prize for a woman photographer who, like her own younger self, is seeking to create positive outcomes to global issues through the power of a camera lens.

“When I took the Algerian refugee photographs, it was because I hoped someone would do something about their situation. I say very humbly that I want to make the world a better place.”

Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography will be on show at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery until 8 May. The book of the same name is published by Bluecoat and is available at marilynstaffordphotography.com, where you can also find information about the award for women photographers