From Einstein to couture
Photographer, 96, has work featured at museum and art gallery in England
Picture this: You’ve never really used a camera before, but there you are, zipping along in a car bound for Princeton, New Jersey, 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, Stafford worked as a photographer for more than 50 years, in a career that took her to India, Bangladesh, Tunisia, London and Paris, capturing cutting-edge prêt-àporter fashion; the realities of urban poverty; and the impact of conflict.
Her greatest skill was portraiture: singer Édith Piaf, writer Italo Calvino, actress Sharon Tate and 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 Stafford lives, has collected all these photographs for the first time. “Marilyn Stafford: A life In Photography” runs until May 8 at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (there is also an accompanying book). Together, 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 prime minister 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,” 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 actors Paul Newman and Joel Gray also studied.
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 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.”
Although much of her career was carved out through steely determination, Stafford’s encounter with Einstein was kismet. In 1948, 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 mm 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 New York fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, Stafford moved to Paris, where she would spend a decade. There, her love for photography deepened, and she befriended Piaf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Noël Coward and Bing Crosby.
Writer Mulk Raj Anand, her good friend, introduced her to photography greats like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson, who became her mentors.
Stafford had a talent for creating an unfussy intimacy with her subjects.
You see this with Indira
Gandhi, with whom Stafford spent a month in 1972. It was a tumultuous period, during which Bangladesh was formed, and Stafford gained access to the former prime minister’s home life, photographing her caring for her grandchildren and playing with her dog.
The series also captured 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,” Stafford said.
She got along with extroverts too. 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.” Stafford joined in.
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 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 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 Stafford had been captivated by Lange’s photographs of the Dust Bowl famine in Life magazine.
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.