Marilyn Stafford’s Wild and Expansive Photography Career


Miss Stafford would then use what she had learned – particularly the Stanislavski technique – to immerse herself in the world of her subjects and disappear completely. She moved to New York in 1947 with dreams of success on Broadway.

Around this time, he began to experiment with films. Largely self-taught, his technique was deliberately haphazard, and the slogan of Russian film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein was “shoot, shoot, shoot; cut, cut, cut.” He would often work on a few rolls of film to focus on his subject and get “the one.”

While much of her career has been shaped by steely determination, Miss Stafford’s encounter with Einstein was fortunate. In 1948, Miss Stafford, then 24, worked with a film crew seeking Einstein’s views on the atomic bomb after Hiroshima. On her way from Manhattan to the physicist’s home in Princeton, she was given a 35-millimeter camera and told she would be a “woman included.”

The resulting portrait shows the grown-up physicist in a spectral blur – a foggy ghostly haze with the flawless aesthetic that stems from a novice’s technical ambiguity but still defines a Stafford photograph. After taking the photo, he was now imagining a life behind the camera, not in front of it.

After apprenticing with New York fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo in 1949, Miss Stafford moved to Paris, where she would spend ten years. There, his love for photography deepened and Édith Piaf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Noël Coward and Bing Crosby.

His close friend, writer Mulk Raj Anand, introduced him to photography marvels such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson, who were his mentors.



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