Marilyn Stafford

Marilyn Jean Stafford (née Gerson; 5 November 1925 – 2 January 2023) was a British photographer. Born and raised in the United States, she moved to Paris as a young woman, where she began working as a photojournalist. She settled in London, but travelled and worked across the world, including in Tunisia, India, and Lebanon. Her work was published in The Observer and other newspapers. Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer in Paris, where she photographed models in the streets in everyday situations, rather than in the more usual opulent surroundings.Stafford published three books of photographs, Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey Through Lebanon in the Sixties (1998); Stories in Pictures: A Photographic Memoir 1950 (2014) of Paris in the 1950s; and Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography (2021). She had solo exhibitions at the Nehru Centre, London; Arundel Museum; Alliance Française de Toronto; Art Bermondsey Project Space; Farleys House, East Sussex; and a retrospective at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in 2022. In 2020 she was awarded the Chairman's Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Picture Editors' Guild Awards in London.