“A marvelous and delightful way to earn a living” is how American photographer Marilyn Stafford describes her career in an interview with the Guardian newspaper this week just as a massive retrospective exhibition in the U.K. shows for the first time her decades-worth of “lost” images. A working photojournalist and commercial fashion photographer until the 1980s, the now 96-year-old Stafford photographed celebrities, war zones, urban life, Parisian slums, fashion models, and remote village life in Africa and Asia. The recent discovery of her never-before-published old photos — which had been hidden away in shoes boxes and forgotten for decades — have been turned into an exhibition in Brighton, England, and brought new attention to Stafford and her incredible life and body of work. Her images are reminiscent of the street-photography style of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was a friend and informal mentor.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 