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‘Einstein was smiling at me!’ Photographer Marilyn Stafford, 96, on celebrities, slums – and breakfast with Edith Piaf
She took pictures of world leaders and war zones, sung in a Paris nightclub and befriended Cartier-Bresson – then left her pictures under her bed for decades. As an exhibition of her work opens, she looks back on her extraordinary life
Marilyn Stafford’s career was hardly unsuccessful. The pioneering photographer quietly documented much of the 20th century – slums, celebrities, war zones, world leaders, everything. But she has never been celebrated like she is today. After the exhibitions dedicated to her fashion and street photography, reportage and portraiture, Brighton Museum is paying tribute to her with a full retrospective. The 96-year-old tells me she can’t believe what has happened – not least because she stored her photographs in shoe boxes under her bed for decades and pretty much forgot about them.
Stafford is on the short side (5ft 1in at her peak), glamorous, serious-minded – and a huge amount of fun. And boy does she have stories. Even her stories have stories. So we start in the Great Depression, when she was a little girl walking to the big department store downtown in Cleveland, Ohio, with her mother. She noticed that a girl ahead of her was not wearing shoes, and asked why. “My mother said: ‘Probably because the family can’t afford them.’ And I think that was one of my early eye-openers on reality.”
Marilyn Stafford in Lebanon, 1960.
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