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The chic and the shabby: Paris in the 1950s by Marilyn Stafford | Art and design

The chic and the shabby: Paris in the 1950s by Marilyn Stafford

US photojournalist Marilyn Stafford worked for fashion houses, and documented the lives of slum children and refugees fleeing Algeria’s war of independence

A new exhibition at Lucy Bell Gallery in St Leonards-on-Sea shines a light on her work

Main image: Prêt-à-Porter, Paris 1950 Photograph: © Marilyn Stafford

Sat 29 Apr 2017 12.29 EDT Last modified on Thu 26 Mar 2020 10.34 EDT

  • Prêt-à-Porter, Montmartre

    Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925, Stafford moved to Paris in 1948, where she met and became friends with the Magnum founders Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who would help shape her work

  • Cité Lesage-Bullourde

    Between completing commissions for a number of fashion houses, Cartier-Bresson encouraged Stafford to go onto the streets of Paris and take pictures. She would get on a bus and go to the end of the line. On one trip she photographed children living in one of the city’s notorious slums, Cité Lesage-Bullourde

  • 14 Boulevard de la Bastille

  • Prêt-à-Porter

  • Cité Lesage-Bullourde

    A maze of blind alleys and passageways, this overcrowded slum built around 1864 housed small craft workshops and households in unsanitary and cramped conditions. Many of its inhabitants were immigrants

  • Henri Cartier-Bresson

    Marilyn Stafford: ‘I often went out photographing with Cartier-Bresson. The time I photographed him was at a household and appliance exhibition at the Grand Palais’

  • Boulogne-Billancourt

    Children play in a street near the site of the Renault car factory, five miles west of central Paris

  • Prêt-à-Porter,

    Place VendômeStafford was one of the first photgraphers to take models out of the studios and chic salons and onto the streets, using a photo-documentary style

  • Cité Lesage-Bullourde

    The slum was demolished in 1984 to make way for the Opéra Bastille and expensive modern apartment blocks. A small thoroughfare, Le Passage Bullourde, is all that remains

  • Boulogne-Billancourt

  • Cité Lesage-Bullourde

  • Edith Piaf

    For a short while after moving to Paris, Stafford sang with an ensemble at Chez Carrère near the Champs Elysees. There she met Piaf

  • Boulogne-Billancourt

  • Algerian refugee mother, 1958

    In 1958, Stafford travelled to the border between Tunisia and Algeria to document Algerian refugees fleeing France’s ‘scorched earth’ attacks. This photograph is the one of which she is most proud: ‘That image meant more than anything else. It was very moving to see the people living as they were’

  • Algerian refugee mother in Tunisia, 1958

    Stafford took her Algerian photographs to Cartier-Bresson. He had forged a relationship with the Observer through its picture editor, Mechthild Nawiasky, and he sent a selection of Stafford’s work to the paper

  • The Observer, 30 March 1958

    Two of Stafford’s images appeared on the front page, her first splash. The original caption was: French action in imposing a belt of patrolled no-man’s-land along the Algerian frontier has blocked the stream of families fleeing into Tunisia. But already between 80,000 and 100,000 refugees – these children and a mother among them – have been settled in camps of tents. Marilyn Gerson took these pictures at a camp near the bombed village of Sakiet.

  • Marilyn Stafford, photographed by the fashion photographer Gene Fenn, who she was assisting at the time. The shot was taken in Paris in the 1950s with Stafford wearing a mink coat belonging to a fashion house

  • Chanel suit, Haute Couture

    The exhibition, Marilyn Stafford - Stories in Pictures 1950-60, is at Lucy Bell Fine Art from 6 May to 24 June and at Art Bermondsey Project Space from 27 June to 9 July
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