Snapshots of the century... From Einstein to Twiggy!
Ahead of a stunning new exhibition of her work, the groundbreaking photojournalist Marilyn Stafford recalls the chance encounters that saw her create some of the most iconic images ever
THE FIRST time she used 35mm film, back in 1948, was to photograph one of the most famous men in the world, Albert Einstein. She didn’t even know how to use the camera and had to read the manual on the drive over to his house in New Jersey. But Marilyn Stafford went on to photograph some of the most important, powerful and glamorous people of the 20th century in a career spanning nearly five decades.
Now 96 years old and living in a modest terraced house just outside Brighton, she is having her first retrospective exhibition at the city’s Museum and Art Gallery.
Marilyn Gerson (her maiden name before she married Robin Stafford, a Daily Express foreign correspondent) had never intended to be a photographer. Born in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, she wanted to be an actress and, aged 10, attended Cleveland Playhouse where her fellow child students were Paul Newman and Joel Grey (Emcee in the original Cabaret film). But a series of “serendipitous events” changed her life.
She went straight from university to New York, becoming friends with filmmakers at the Museum of Modern Art. “One of these documentary makers gave me an old Rolleiflex he had brought back from the war in Germany. It became my first camera.”
Then came the morning another friend invited her to take some photographs while he filmed an interview. He thrust a Canon 35mm – a format she’d never used before – into her hands. The subject turned out to be Einstein, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who developed the theory of relativity.
“I didn’t get to speak with him much but I do remember he was friendly and modest,” she says. “He asked how fast the film passed through the camera. My director told him the speed and Einstein replied quietly, ‘Thank you very much. Now I understand’.”
Despite her middle-class background, having grown up in the Great Depression Marilyn has always been alert to poverty and injustices around her.
“I remember vividly, when I was five or six, my mother taking me from the leafy green suburbs into downtown Cleveland. I saw a child with bare feet and asked, ‘Why is that child not wearing shoes?’.”
Told that the family probably couldn’t afford shoes, she was shocked. “It was such an eye-opener,” she said. “It made me really want to know why there were people who couldn’t afford the things we could.”
So, almost from the day she first picked up a camera, she realised she could use it to address inequality and injustice, and possibly even change the world for the better. She left America to move to Paris in December 1948.
To make ends meet, she sang at the famous dinner club Chez Carrère near the ChampsÉlysées.The guest list was a who’s who of the rich and famous, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Bing Crosby. Edith Piaf’s latest lover, Eddie Constantine, was a fellow performer.
After finishing her own show at a neighbouring club, Piaf would sweep by to pick up Eddie and Marilyn and take them to her house in the Bois de Boulogne.
Charles Aznavour, Piaf’s lodger, would often join them for breakfast. Crosby and Marilyn became friends but she refused his attempts to take the relationship further.
“I wasn’t interested because he was married,” she smiles. “I was a bit of a prude. He was very sweet though. I shared a groundfloor flat with another American girl. Bing would knock on our window in the mornings and bring us croissants for breakfast.”
Nodes on her vocal chords curtailed the singing career and, after a stint in public relations, she concentrated on photojournalism.
She freelanced for magazines, befriending photographers Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. At the suggestion of the latter, she became one of the first photographers to take models out of the studio into
the streets. She spent her own time recording the impoverished lives of slum children.
Between fashion work, she flew to Lebanon and North Africa as refugees fled the Algerian War of Independence, capturing some of the images of which she remains most proud: women, bravely maintaining their dignity as they struggled to survive.
Those pictures made the front page of The Observer in 1958 and brought the crisis to the world’s attention. She married Stafford in 1956 but their relationship faltered and, when his career took him to Moscow in the mid-60s, she stayed behind.
“The marriage was beginning to disintegrate by then anyway,” she explains. “And Russia at that time was a very difficult place. I would never have been able to walk around and take photographs.”
She moved to Britain with their daughter, Lina. As a single mother, “Swinging London”, was challenging.
“Everyone was suddenly discovering sex. Some guys wouldn’t even ask you out for a cup of coffee unless it was assumed that you would go to bed with them.”
Luckily, not all the men she met were so crass. “A friend was one of the writers of the film The Dirty Dozen. He invited me to a dinner party and I met Lee Marvin. He was a friendly guy; no side to him. He invited me out so I showed him around London. One day, I mentioned I had never seen his film Paint Your Wagon, so he took his boots off, stood up and sang I Was Born Under a Wandering Star to me. It was wonderful.”
Despite juggling work and parenthood, Marilyn says life has been kind to her. “I’ve met lots of lovely people who’ve helped me by opening doors.”
BUT BEING a female photographer in London in the 60s wasn’t easy. “The few women in Fleet Street weren’t really recognised. You could only do women’s photographs; country houses, women’s issues.You weren’t allowed news.”
Angered by this, Marilyn turned the lens on the male hypocrisy which was part and parcel of the fashion business. In the beautifully produced book that accompanies her exhibition, she recalls being sent to photograph Twiggy, the hot new model.
Of the media furore, she writes: “To me, this embodied the male gaze – the objectification of women.” One photograph was taken at Twiggy’s feet because the scrum of male photographers jostling around the model had forced Marilyn to the only position left available: lying on the floor.
She has remained on good terms with many of her models and some have contributed to her book. Joanna Lumley, who she photographed in 1966, writes: “I have always loved the picture Marilyn took of me in a [dress by] Jean Muir and I have a framed print… on the wall as you go up the stairs.”
In the early 1970s, she photographed another iconic woman, Indira Gandhi – the first and, to date, only female prime minister of India, who was assassinated in 1984.
Marilyn finally hung up her camera when digital photography meant it was time to hand the lens to a new generation.
But if she could be persuaded to pick up her trusty Nikon and point the lens at injustice just one more time, where would she go?
“The most vital story now is Afghanistan. I really feel so deeply for the women there.”
And who’s to say that she might not just jet off “on assignment” once she’s put the finishing touches to her retrospective?
Marilyn may be approaching her 100th year, but, as she says, still with a sparkle in her eye: “Photographers don’t grow old – they just grow out of focus.”
Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography is at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery from February 22 to May 8.Visit brighton museums.org.uk. The accompanying book is published by The Bluecoat Press and available from marilynstaffordphotography.com