Marilyn Stafford: A life in pictures
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What makes a great photograph? In 2019, Stephen Sackur spoke to one of the pioneers of photojournalism, Marilyn Stafford. She was born in the United States but moved to Paris in the 1950s, where she became the protégé of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Like him, Stafford loved to capture intimate portraits of ordinary people. She photographed everything from refugees fleeing war to models on the fashion catwalks. Later in life, her work was discovered and admired by a new generation.
This is another chance to listen to the interview with Marilyn Stafford after her recent death aged 97. The interview was updated on 13th January 2023.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. In 2019, I journeyed to the south coast of England |
| 0:06.5 | to meet one of the great female pioneers in photojournalism, Marilyn Stafford, who has died at the age of 97. |
| 0:17.6 | She was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She moved to Paris in search of a singing career. |
| 0:22.7 | But almost by accident, she discovered that she had a major talent as a photographer. |
| 0:29.1 | She won the admiration of the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. |
| 0:33.9 | And like him, she loved to capture intimate pictures of ordinary people on the streets rather than in the studio. |
| 0:42.4 | In the course of her career, she became one of the very few women photographers to challenge the male |
| 0:48.0 | domination of Fleet Street. She combined journeys to conflict zones with glamorous fashion shoots, and her portraits of 20th century icons like Albert Einstein and Edith Piaf are familiar to many. |
| 1:03.0 | But she never won the international fame of some of her male peers. |
| 1:07.9 | In recent years, her work was rediscovered and admired by a new generation. And here's |
| 1:13.9 | another chance to hear my interview with Marilyn Stafford. Let's start way back. You trained as an |
| 1:22.8 | actress. You spend a while as a nightclub singer, and yet you really found your creative voice in photography. |
| 1:31.3 | What was it about photography that really reached into your soul? |
| 1:37.0 | I have been called an accidental photographer because I really did not set out to do the photography at all. The photography was |
| 1:48.6 | something that was just there. When I was a child, everybody had a little box brownie. Every |
| 1:55.5 | family had a little box brownie. And so the photography was just part of life. It wasn't anything. It wasn't |
| 2:06.0 | photography. It was just you had a camera and you took pictures. Would you say you were a natural |
| 2:13.2 | observer, sometimes a little bit removed and looking in on things? I think probably yes. |
| 2:20.9 | I think probably to explain it to you, I remember taking my first photograph and why I took |
| 2:28.9 | my first photograph. |
| 2:30.8 | It was on a family picnic and we were by a stream. |
| 2:35.1 | And the stream was of very, very clear water running over pebbles. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.