Marilyn Stafford

In 2017, it was reported that Stafford was living in West Sussex, England. She had a daughter, Lina Clerke.

The Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award was launched on International Women's Day 2017. It is granted annually to a professional woman photographer working on a documentary photo essay which addresses a social, environmental, economic or cultural issue. The winner receives £2000 (initially £1000) and mentoring by Stafford and FotoDocument, an organisation that uses documentary photography to draw attention to positive social and environmental activity.

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.

Stafford and her husband separated. In the mid-1960s she moved to London, working as a photographer in various roles. She worked freelance as an international photojournalist for The Observer on both commissions and self-assigned projects, one of few women photographers working for national newspapers at that time. In 1972 she spent a month photographing Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India. She worked as a stills photographer on feature films and commercials, including on All Neat in Black Stockings (1969).

In the late 1950s her husband's work sent the couple to Rome, then in the early 1960s to Beirut for over a year. Stafford travelled extensively in Lebanon, photographing people and places, later collected in her book Silent Stories: A Photographic Journey through Lebanon in the Sixties (1998).

In 1948, Stafford went with friends interviewing Albert Einstein for a documentary film. In the car they handed her a 35 mm camera—she had never used one before—and gave her a quick lesson on how to use it. She took several photographs and gave the film to her friends, who sent her a couple of prints. In order to gain experience in photography, she worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo.

In December 1948 she joined a friend in moving to Paris. For a short while she sang with an ensemble at Chez Carrère, a dinner club off the Champs-Élysées. There she met and became friends with the war photographer and photojournalist Robert Capa. She carried a camera and took what she later described as "happy snaps", but, working as a singer, had no thought of becoming a professional photographer until she lost her voice and could not continue singing. She asked Capa for advice on becoming a photographer; he suggested war photography, but this did not appeal to her. Her friend the writer Mulk Raj Anand introduced her to another photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who she also became friends with. Cartier-Bresson encouraged her to take photographs on the streets of Paris, so she took buses to the end of the line and made photographss such as of children (some candid, some not) in the slum of Cité Lesage-Bullourde (near Place de la Bastille, and since cleared to make way for Opéra Bastille); and in the neighbourhood of Boulogne-Billancourt, in 1950. In 1956 she married Robin Stafford, a British foreign correspondent for the Daily Express working in Paris. In 1958, whilst five or six months pregnant with their daughter, Stafford went on a personal assignment to Tunisia to document and publicise the plight of Algerian refugees fleeing France's scorched earth aerial bombardment in the Algerian War. Back in Paris she showed the pictures to Cartier-Bresson, who made a selection and sent them to The Observer, which published two on its front page.

Marilyn Jean Stafford (née Gerson; 5 November 1925 – 2 January 2023) was a British photographer. She worked mainly as a freelance photojournalist based in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, then in London, travelling to Lebanon, Tunisia, India and elsewhere. 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 was born Marilyn Gerson on 5 November 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States.