Marilyn Stafford – A legend that will never grow out of focus.
HAVING LED A LIFE that has all the makings of a tremendous film script, Marilyn Stafford is still bright and alert and full of stories about the people she’s met, the places she’s been and the trails she’s blazed, the latter often inadvertently, as she followed her gut instinct and, by so doing, hit on something no-one else happened to be doing at the time. Throughout it all she remained crystal clear about her objectives and what it was that had inspired her to pick up a camera in the first place: “I always wanted to be a story teller,” she says simply, “and everything else just fell into place around that.”
Born in Cleveland Ohio in 1925 at the time of the Great Depression, her early aspirations weren’t centred around the visual arts at all. Rather she envisaged a career on the stage and, at the age of seven, she was training to be an actor with the Cleveland Play House, moving to New York when she hit adulthood because “that was where you went when you had to find work in the theatre.” Although she had some small roles off-Broadway and a few television appearances, like so many actors she was ‘resting’ for much of the time and to keep some income coming in she looked for additional work and ended up working as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, who was then on the threshold of a spectacular career in the business but at this point was shooting catalogue work.
“I learned so much from just being around in the studio,” Marilyn recalls. “I was the person who was known as the pin girl, because the models used to be pinned tightly into their clothes for the shoot to make sure they fitted perfectly and when it was over they would give a sigh of relief and there would be pins everywhere! I was at the bottom of the ladder at the time but was really enjoying the experience.”