Marilyn Stafford retrospective exhibition
A retrospective exhibition showcasing decades of archive photography by 96-year-old Sussex photographer Marilyn Stafford is running at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
Spokeswoman Nicola Jeffs said it encompasses the most comprehensive display of the photographer’s work to date. Works come from an international archive spanning four decades and include celebrity portraits, fashion shoots, street photography, humanitarian stories and newspaper reportage.
The exhibition, A Life in Photography, takes place at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery until May 8.
“It will offer a reflective and engaging look at a period of 20th century history through the photographer’s unique gaze. It will feature many of the stories from her career, which remain untold, with images never seen before by the public. A Life in Photography, curated by Nina Emett in collaboration with Stafford’s daughter Lina Clerke, will then travel to Dimbola Museum & Galleries (Isle of Wight, Hampshire) in the summer of 2022.
“At Brighton Museum & Art Gallery the exhibition will also include a range of ephemera from Stafford’s archive including cameras and original cuttings, recordings of her speaking about her life and work and an additional display of silver gelatin prints as well as specially organised expanded content, such as a film, soundtracks to Marilyn’s life and more. An accompanying retrospective book of her work Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography is available from www. bluecoatpress.co.uk from
October 2021, including an essay by art critic Jennifer Higgie and a foreword by the late photojournalist Tom Stoddart.
“Marilyn Stafford’s photography career got off to a remarkable start when she was invited, as a young woman, to take stills of Albert Einstein. Since then, she has accumulated an eclectic body of work, spanning from 1948-1980, including further portraits of famous and influential figures such as Edith Piaf, Henri CartierBresson, Mulk Raj Anand, Indira Gandhi, Albert Finney, Twiggy and Joanna Lumley. She has also photographed many ordinary people like the illiterate Sicilian peasant woman, Francesca Serio, who took the Mafia to trial for murdering her son.
“Stafford has also engaged in street photography, mainly in the 1950s, documenting the Parisian children of the Cité Lesage-Bullourde neighbourhood living in slum housing conditions as well as the bustling, and sometimes downtrodden, street life of Boulogne-Billancourt.
“Stafford has witnessed some significant, and sometimes turbulent, periods of modern social and political history. She photographed Algerian refugees in Tunisia fleeing the Algerian War of Independence in 1958 which gained her front page of the Observer; she captured Lebanon in the 1960s during a time of peace before civil war would ravage the country a decade later which was published by Saqi books; she created a unique and intimate documentary about Indira Gandhi, India’s first and only woman Prime Minister, during India’s intervention in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. Alongside her humanitarian focused photography, Stafford took advantage of opportunities open to her as a female photographer, including commissioned portraits.”