Marilyn Stafford, a Photojournalist Rediscovered, Dies at 97

Marilyn Stafford’s journey from aspiring Broadway singer and actress to famous photojournalist and style photographer began with a drive to New Jersey and a spasm of concern.

One morning in 1948, Ms. Stafford, who was 23, was tagging together with two pals who had been driving to the house of Albert Einstein in Princeton, N.J., to make a brief documentary about him and his views, as one in every of historical past’s best physicists, on the dawning of atomic weapons. On the automotive experience down, one of many pals handed Ms. Stafford a 35-millimeter digicam and requested her to take some stills between takes. “I’d by no means used one earlier than, and I went right into a panic,” she recalled in a 2021 interview.

There was little to fret about, it turned out. Einstein, carrying dishevelled pants and a sweatshirt, appeared mild and modest as he greeted the three at his door. As her pals arrange their film cameras, Ms. Stafford started snapping away as Einstein slumped right into a floral-print chair close to a fire and stared distractedly into the gap.

Her pals finally despatched her a few prints from her rolls of movie. One stood out. Gauzy and barely out of focus, the shot of the seated Einstein was not technically excellent, but it surely captured him in an unguarded second, wanting ruminative, maybe mournful.

Ms. Stafford would finally commerce her Broadway goals for a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex digicam on her strategy to turning into a pioneering, if underrecognized, photojournalist and style photographer. However the Einstein picture was a harbinger of what would turn into her specialty: piercing the superstar armor of Hollywood stars, fashionistas and even world leaders and discovering a story behind the picture.

Ms. Stafford died on Jan. 2 at her house in Shoreham-by-Sea, on the south coast of England, her publicist, Nicola Jeffs, mentioned. She was 97.

“I like to inform tales,” Ms. Stafford mentioned in an interview with The New York Occasions final 12 months, “and for me, taking {a photograph} is like telling a narrative. I inform it subconsciously, as I take the image.”

She by no means achieved something near the celebrity of Twentieth-century masters like Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson. For many years her archive largely consisted of shoe containers filled with images stuffed beneath her mattress, and far of her work might need been misplaced to historical past if it weren’t for an opportunity assembly with a images curator named Nina Emett at a gallery present in Sussex, England, when Ms. Stafford was in her 90s.

Ms. Emett spent the subsequent a number of years bringing Ms. Stafford’s work again into the general public eye, culminating final 12 months in “Marilyn Stafford: A Life In Pictures,” a much-publicized retrospective that Ms. Emett curated with Ms. Stafford’s daughter, Lina Clerke, in Brighton, England, and an accompanying monograph.

“Working on this male-dominated discipline in opposition to the gender expectations of her time, Marilyn elevated social considerations that had been ignored or underrepresented by mainstream media,” Helen Trompeteler, a British images author and curator and a pal of Ms. Stafford’s, wrote in an e mail. “Her distinctive archive supplies a singular perception into Twentieth-century historical past and displays her lifelong advocacy for ladies’s rights and illustration.”

As a contract photographer based mostly in Paris within the Nineteen Fifties, and later, London, Ms. Stafford chronicled the poor in Paris in addition to the struggles of rape victims in India and of refugees from the Algerian warfare of independence from France within the Nineteen Fifties.

Even when photographing the well-known, she sometimes opted to shoot them in candid, revealing moments at house. Through the years she produced richly expressive portraits of movie luminaries (Lee Marvin, Sharon Tate, Richard Attenborough and Alan Bates); era-defining fashions (Twiggy, Joanna Lumley); musicians (Donovan, Édith Piaf, with whom she briefly lived in Paris) and public intellectuals (the architect Le Corbusier, the author Italo Calvino).

In 1972, Ms. Stafford spent a month shadowing Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, capturing her in quiet moments at house together with her grandchildren and canine, as nicely in public moments, like visiting troopers wounded within the Indo-Pakistani Battle of 1971.

Her style images, which she began within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, got here at a fortuitous time, with the rise of ready-to-wear, which introduced the work of couture designers to the lots. However even when capturing for haute style magazines like Vogue, she introduced a street-photographer’s style for the genuine, posing fashions in Chanel and Givenchy, for instance, in entrance of graffiti-strewn partitions of Paris. She was delighted, she instructed The Occasions, to be referred to as “a reverse snob” by the style editor of Le Figaro.

“I used to be by no means concerned about studio work,” Ms. Stafford mentioned in a 2018 interview with Photomonitor, a images website, “as a result of my actual feeling was out on the planet on a documentary and storytelling foundation, slightly than simply photographing the garments.”

Marilyn Jean Gerson was born on Nov. 5, 1925, in Cleveland, the eldest of two daughters of Maurice Gerson, a pharmacist, and Dorothy (Soglovitz) Gerson, who offered antiques.

As a youth, she studied on the Cleveland Play Home. However she grew to become conscious of human struggling throughout the Nice Despair by way of documentary images, equivalent to Dorothea Lange’s pictures of migrant households escaping the Mud Bowl.

“From an early age, I used to be conscious that horrible issues might occur,” she mentioned in a 2021 interview with Digital Digital camera World, a images journal. “But in addition, that one thing could possibly be completed about them if there was the desire, and finally it appeared to me that images is likely to be a solution, though that realization solely got here quite a bit later.”

Ms. Stafford studied English and drama for a time on the College of Wisconsin earlier than transferring to New York in 1946 to pursue a stage profession. She made ends meet as an assistant to the style photographer Francesco Scavullo. In 1949, she adopted a pal in a transfer to Paris, which might turn into her house for greater than a decade.

Touchdown a coveted singing gig at a dinner membership off the Champs-Élysées referred to as Chez Carrère, Ms. Stafford befriended entertainers like Noël Coward, Maurice Chevalier and Piaf in addition to giants of photojournalism like Cartier-Bresson and the fight photographer Robert Capa, who had been among the many founders of Magnum Photographs.

Ms. Stafford instructed Mr. Capa that she was shedding her singing voice and in search of a brand new profession course. He prompt that she work as an assistant to a different Magnum founder and fight photographer, David Seymour, who was identified professionally as Chim. Ms. Stafford had no need to dodge bullets in warfare zones, Ms. Jeffs mentioned in an e mail. As an alternative, she took a job in style public relations. (Mr. Capa was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a land mine whereas masking the First Indochina Battle; Mr. Seymour was killed by Egyptian sniper two years later whereas masking the Suez disaster.)

Ms. Stafford would, nevertheless, quickly journey to bother spots world wide together with her husband, Robin Stafford, a overseas correspondent for the British newspaper The Day by day Categorical, whom she married in 1958 after a quick marriage to Joseph Kohn, a filmmaker.

She was six months pregnant with their daughter, Lina, when she adopted Mr. Stafford on an project to cowl the warfare in Algeria. Ms. Stafford thought of the journey a piece project of types for her as nicely. She took harrowing photographs of Algerian refugees in Tunisia. “No person appeared involved in regards to the refugee disaster that was unfolding,” she mentioned within the Occasions interview final 12 months.

Upon returning to Paris, she despatched her images to Mr. Cartier-Bresson, who chosen the perfect and despatched them to The Observer, one other British newspaper. It printed two of her images on the entrance web page, one in every of a refugee mom, caked in grime, nursing her little one. The photographs helped increase consciousness of the disaster.

The Staffords subsequently settled for intervals in Rome, Beirut and New York. After the couple divorced in 1965, Ms. Stafford moved to London and co-founded an company specializing in style, partly as a method to fund her photojournalistic work. Trend “has its enjoyable aspect,” she instructed Photomonitor, “in order that balances my severe aspect, if you’ll.”

She is survived by her daughter and a grandson. Her third husband, João Manuel Viera, whom she married in 2001, died in 2016.

In 2017, she based The Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, in collaboration with FotoDocument, a nonprofit group that helps environmental and social images world wide.

Ms. Stafford retired within the Eighties to be taught Mandarin, write poetry and assist human rights initiatives. Or perhaps her razor-sharp photographic imaginative and prescient had misplaced a little bit of readability. “A few years in the past,” she mentioned, “a photographer in New York instructed me, ‘Photographers don’t develop previous, they only develop out of focus.’”