My girlfriend and I are walking up the steps from Brighton’s beach front to the street above when an image catches my eye; an elegant woman, standing beside a large window in which she is reflected, on a street recognisably Parisian, and behind her, a few feet away in the background, a middle aged man stopped in the street, turning back and looking at what’s going on. The image at once evokes the Paris of the 50s and 60s as seen in French New Wave films.
I stop to look at the image. It is a poster for a photography exhibition by one Marilyn Stafford. I have never heard of her. The exhibition is held at Brighton Pavilion art centre. I check the dates; it is current. Tomorrow, Karen has to attend the Brighton Centre in preparation for her Open University graduation ceremony; I will have a few hours to kill. This will be the perfect way to commit the necessary temporal murder…
The next day, we get up and ready early, walk from our hotel in Brighton’s marina, passing the wasteland of industrial parks, scrubland, and seemingly abandoned paths and buildings above and alongside the waterfront, which bring to mind the mansions of illegal drug cartels and oligarchs left behind in violent changes of regime.
From there, we make our way to the better known parts of Brighton, and by the sealife centre and the Royal Albion Hotel we part ways, and I make my way alone towards the Pavilion. Once there, I make a dash to the toilet, with suspicious permission, before returning to buy my ticket for the exhibition, pleased to learn I can return anytime in the next year with the same ticket. Then I make my way upstairs to the exhibition.
On entering, I am advised by the gallery attendant to watch a video in the second room, but can barely hear what is being said, and the attendants know no way of raising the volume. Back in the first room, I am confronted with the usual, brief biographical information typical of exhibitions; in this case, our subject was an aspiring entertainer turned photographer. A stylish 40s press photo reveals a woman of considerable beauty, a typically convincing starlet. What could have led her away from that fate towards her eventual destiny?
Next comes a portrait of Einstein. At this point it is worth noting that, as is sometimes mysteriously the case, the feats of serendipity – or synchronicities, as our subject prefers to call them – in the life of Marilyn Stafford, far from striking this observer with their improbability, in fact wash over him like the easeful breath of facts. That she should have made her segway from entertainment into photography by way of capturing what has come to be the icon of genius is as underwhelming to me as the opposite that its mention appears to suggest. But perhaps the reason for this is all around me, for as soon as I stepped into the first of these two humble rooms, it was to be surrounded by innumerable proofs of the true innarrativity of existence; that nothing moves in straight lines or predictable formations, much as the lauded physicist would himself agree or disagree, depending on his own state of observation….
From here we move immediately to where all souls go when they depart from the world of the staid and predictable: post-war Paris – captured archetypally in the whimsical image of a cat perched outside a grocery store among all the whicker baskets and wooden crates, as a woman looks surreptitiously on from the shadows of the doorway. It is in this section that we see the first of more natural images of Marilyn, and as is usually the case, in my opinion, she is more beautiful in nature than in glamour. Once again, she seems to find herself among fortuitous places and people – though perhaps post-war Paris is the former that almost presupposes the latter more surely than even Einstein’s God could predict.
Her image of Edith Piaf, Marguerite Monnot and Eddie Constantine looking out of a window strikes me immediately with its composition, inchoately redolent of the kind of posing typical of air hostesses in airline marketing, promotional shots of rock bands, family portrait studios, and professional photoshoots at graduation ceremonies. One hopes there is something drawing these six eyes in unison. The following images are far more relaxed and true to life; a giddy Piaf, Constantine and Charles Aznavour, with a uniformed young man looking on adoringly at Piaf – reminding the viewer, if possible, of the latter’s sub-humble origins. The same giddy good spirits of the Little Sparrow are visible in the candid shot of her reclining in a wing-back chair, the exuberance bursting from within the pleats of the flowing dress and lovely beaming features.
“Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search of fresh sensations,” says Oscar Wilde in De Profundis. The depths, for Marilyn Stafford, are in Cite Lesage-Bullourde. (Humour my taking liberties). I love these images. There poetry is oblique. Just what the doctor ordered for one as visually illiterate as myself. I love the little girl in the striped dress who kneels on one knee with her arms outstretched, her hands held by that of a little girl I was sure was a little boy standing behind her, as three boys (apparently unanimous) form a tight semi-circle behind them; two of them smiling on to the camera, the other distracting the ambiguous girl from her moment of glory by sticking the fingers of one hand up behind her head – one of those cultural memes whose origins seem almost mystical on reflection – while with the other hand inexplicably clutching a brief case. I love these children for being children and doing what children do: being happy. But I love the little girl in front for something more; her eyes are closed, her face taut with defiance, strain. She is not in this photo. She is far away, somewhere we can only infer from the incongruity of her pose in such surroundings. She is in the prevailing spirit of innocence with its visions from beyond narrativity, of things as they could be, not as they are. I can imagine the other three children growing up in much the same environment they are here immortalised in, and I can imagine them more or less happy. But the little girl in the striped dress I can imagine, like Piaf, like Wilde, either at the very heights, or at the very depths; never happy, because she is forever defying her circumstances. But that is images; deceptive, because they are full of us.
The rest of the Lesage-Bullourde series is replete with the signs of transcending one’s condition; the little girl who, carrying a mere milk bottle that amounts to a quarter of her size, struts past her neighbouring children with a look of such determination, as if to say, “This is my job!”; the older girl who stands over the little boys rushing joyously for a communal tap assumes the posture of a hall monitor, what I can only presume to be her water pail even taking on the appearance of a megaphone; the girl in woman’s shoes, standing in a shadowy doorway; the poor boy sat on an unidentifiable surface reading a book; the ecstatic boys scaling what could easily represent the Berlin Wall. Some, like the boy with the shifty eyes eating a treat, and the children who watch with frozen suspicion as a dog trots by, betray their reality; wary, ready to pass on the fate of being at the bottom of the barrel. This series are among the most evocative pieces in the exhibition. It is clear where Marilyn Stafford’s concerns lie.
And once more, we find ourselves, led by Stafford’s eye, into another slum district; confronted with the image of an elderly woman in trench coat, hat and boots, bowed over and peering at a notice trampled into the ground…. Then we read the caption: “Child leaning over”; a woman leans against a wooden-framed honeycomb-wire partition in an enormous window, with shutters either side and two short clothes lines above her head, vacant but for unengaged pegs…. To the side of her window stands a strange ladder that grows narrow towards the top, leaning haphazardly against a lamppost – presumably left for or by the leerie, or lamplighter…. But most interesting is the little grill in the wall beside the ladder; on either side of it are two splashes of white paint not unlike a koala’s ears – but the grill itself is perfectly clean, suggesting, perhaps, that it has been recently replaced. Rough sleepers is particularly striking; two sleepers, at least, can be identified – one only by their feet, covered as they are by some unverifiable material, while closeby lays a not dissimilar sack, another sitting inside a nearby perambulator; where do the sleeping bodies end and the inanimate detritus begin? Tied to the perambulator is a harnessed dog, too weak, perhaps, to escape from its wheeled mooring. Worst of all is the “Brosserie” sign in this scene of filth: a shop selling brushes. In the next scene, a woman actually does sleep in a pram.
Once again, it is the spirit of childhood that brings life to the selfish giant’s garden. But of all the bustling Boys playing on the street, the one whose face floats out at me with the instantaneity of a dream is the fourth from the left who seems almost to look beyond the photograph to some other place and time. In School classroom, the central figure wields, as well as the obligatory pen his classmates each hold - apparently all in their right hands - a stick in his left hand, stowed upright against the table and held like a policeman’s truncheon, matched perfectly by the sternness of his face that has yet to leave the playground.
From there we move onto portraits of famous names; Henri Cartier Bresson looks sly and crafty beneath his Stetson hat and raincoat, a feminine handbag hanging from his shoulder. Tristan Tzara betrays all the intellectual playfulness one would expect from the king of dada. Le Corbusier abounds in imaginative ferment. And there is an interesting dynamic in the left hand covering the mouth of Jean Seberg’s husband while his right hand grips the edge of her seat as she smilingly places a hand on another male friend’s chest as he leans to kiss her head. In her other hand is another cat; cats are a frequent motif if Stafford’s images, cropping up here and there like Waldo.
In Stafford’s work with models in street fashion shoots, she reappears, once more so elegant herself as to make the viewer wonder who is the photographer and who the model. Her naturalness and poise would make her an exceptional model. Yet she prefers to remain unseen. These images display a playfulness that deconstructs the self-importance of the fashion world. Echoing the little girl in the doorway of her Lesage-Bullourde series, an adult model now stands, her expression wistful, hatted, coated, umbrella in one hand, high-heels in the other, in a pair of shoes mysteriously far too large for her, with all the appearance of Chaplin’s Tramp. The same model is then seen struggling to convince a reluctant little dog to look at the passing Seine she points to from the Pont des Arts bridge. It is an interesting contrast in her images, those of dogs on taut leads and cats completely at liberty; it bespeaks of the relative captivity that comes with proximity to humankind. In a handful of images, Stafford decenters her models by framing them beside monuments, lampposts, figurines, onlookers, bystanders, uncompliant, uncomprehending, amused, bemused, perturbed and indifferent witnesses, and settings that render the models’ poses incongruous, even at times absurd, injecting jarring doses of disquieting realism into the fashionable world of which they are the thwarted harbingers.
It is a world away from the images of Algerian refugees that follow, of which, the ones of the mother with the baby are especially prescient. The first image is the most striking, that of the mother staring off to one side, mirrored exactly by her baby, who stares off in the opposite direction, its face forlorn where its mother’s is blank. We know now what may not have been known then regarding the attachment and its interruption between caregivers and infants, and the withdrawing behaviour of the latter when experiencing abandonment, both real and perceived, by the former, and this is perfectly captured, whether real or perceived, in this first image. A subsequent image of the mother focusing on the child, underscored by the comparable lack of other subjects in the frame, augmenting the sense of exclusivity and union in this most vital moment of bonding, shows the child returning her attention with rapt eye contact. The following image of the mother gazing directly into the camera lens while her baby sleeps in her arms round off a perfect series of illustrations of the immeasurable extenuating damage caused by human conflict of the purely rapacious kind; the sort that perpetuates itself in eternally recurring cycles throughout the generations, like the ouroboros.
….A small girl grazes in the path of two donkeys, among an indistinguishable feed…. A mother with gaunt, skeletal features gazes tiredly, limply towards camera, a baby with harrowed features and staring eyes on her back, the staring, harassed eyes of her older children scrambling beneath in the blackness within a tent, their sanctuary, the haunted family framed by rocks…. A young girl looks on from beside a tent at a row of men bowed and faceless in prayer between a tempestuous earth and rocky clouds…. The only figure in this series who appears even close to a smile is the father who holds his baby, hair and face in shock, in this barren wasteland of hope….
The images of Francesca Serio, austere in the extreme, showing, as they do, only the plain, worn determination of her face, imploring hands, and tiny portrait of her murdered son, reveal a woman stripped of all the appurtenances of an existence reduced to the sole mission of attaining justice. The image of her with Stafford at her apartment shows the photographer’s expression, equal parts admiration and disquiet.
When she is capturing more illustrious subjects, her input within the frame is withdrawn, allowing the subjects world to speak for itself. Thus we are witness to the generosity and steadfastness of a Carlo Levi, the contemplation and focus of an Alberto Moravio at work, never off duty when lost in thought as writer friends, Levi and Mulk Raj Anand, engage in colourful discourse, the seemingly irrepressible cheerfulness and boyish pride of Italo Calvino, the gravity and orderliness of Renato Guttuso, and the umbral languor of Pericle Fazzini.
When we next see Stafford herself, it is in 60s Lebanon. The woman looking out of the frame seems arrived, fully formed, a photographer once and for all, married in her fruition to an incredible subject, an image of truly feminine beauty. The aerial view of Khalil Gibran’s birthplace is astounding, the branches at left, right and bottom of the frame giving perspective and realism to this most improbably cavernous void hovering above the earth. The cafe life in Tripoli comes at us in full flow; the stern, watchful expressions of the hookah smokers serve only as a foreground to the lively discourse, games and multifariously inclined onlookers; some suspicious, some amused, others indifferent. The lack of female presence (other than the reflected Stafford) is both startling and sad for the obvious loss of enrichment. The sense of hierarchical distinction is extenuated in the image of the shoeshine man. The market brings a breath of life with its first glimpses of women and girls, reflected in the small portion of open air at the top of the frame, reinvigorating this otherwise claustrophobic scene of amorphous human activity, all centred round a man-made body of water; a nice suggestion of the immanence of our earliest origins. The little girl with the bored expression, selling toffee apples, could be a timeless moment captured; she could be any age, in any time, forever selling those toffee apples. The outpouring of mirth between the artisan and fruiterer belie our notions of alienated labour. Their day’s work appears enjoyable and profitable to us; though we would do well to remember that an image works both ways, and the viewer influences the thing viewed, as suggested so fittingly in the image of Stafford reflected in the cafe mirror.
The Beirut of this series comes across as a jarring coadunation of natural intemperance and human proliferation, of industry and leisure; a wild city, not entirely tamed. I love the almost absurdist logic of the cinema scene, with its attendant characters growing in incongruence and existential revelation as they wither in their proximity to the cinema and its ridiculous Hollywood marquee, obfuscated by the presence of a foreign tongue more dignified in culture. The image of the Rivoli cinema could itself be the poster for a Samuel Beckett play.
Stafford’s photographs of Lebanon portray a land of extreme highs and lows, steeped in the presences and absences of human life; the buildings tower, yet wear the scars of natural decay, spilling over with bodies…. Yet the automobiles are numerous, gleaming, and the vegetation lush and majestic…. It is a land both rough and inviting. This concatenation of elements comes to a head in my mind in the market images; beautiful agglomerations of human and natural produce are shot through with shafts of light, weighed down with dirty age-old crates, set down on dusty, crumbled stone floors and against weathered, plastered walls, and occupied by merchants whose expressions and looks speak of timeless contemplation unfit for such occupations. Another incongruous presence to anyone ignorant of geo-colonial history such as I is that of the French language “adorning” awnings, signs and road names, not to mention the admixture of complexions on the various faces we see.
The occidentalising of the east is uncomfortably apparent in the images of the Miss Lebanon Beauty Pageant that appears to have nothing Lebanese about it! (Though coming from one whose self-proclaimed “ignorance of geo-colonial history” may put pains to such an assertion….) These images are disquieting, and especially in the conspiratorial glance of the model making eye contact with the photographer, and the obscurely discomfited observation of the moustachioed young man to her right. It seems everyone in these images is a captive in this picture, like bodies in a vehicle hurtling out of control. But it could be nothing more than the appropriation of first-hand experience that is affected by the photographic image. But the odd effect continues in the image of bouffanted young women college students, and spills over with a sense of racial alienation in the perhaps innocent Modern art exhibition of a darker skinned man, whose trousers are so short that his socks show, observing a sculpture as two Caucasian men discourse among themselves nearby; again, the possibly deceptive influence of photographs in formation.
The weightlifter, his posture almost caricaturish, surrounded by a group of men and boys in a nondescript scene, shot from a good enough distance to admit a great swathe of the empty sky over half the image, must have seemed ridiculous to a woman photographer who has had to witness the segregation of the sexes for much of her travels. And the cultural cross-currents of the wedding photographs, evoked by the blazer and shoes of the groom against the traditional headdress and rocks upon which he sits, and the combined hints of the western and the Latin in the dress of the bride, and of the clothing of the little boy and the guest against the latter’s headdress, hookah, metalware and setting, gives the impression of a culture in transition, yet to find a stable point in the evolution of its self-consciousness. A far more harmonious image is that of the bride’s guest, in traditional garb within a native setting. The scene of the bride on her throne is an awkward one, seen in the shifting emotions and looks of the woman and girls. The national culture comes more to life, as it always does, in the dance scenes, showing men dancing together and women in traditional fashion, dancing to traditional music. The wedding is an occasion for traditions to be remembered and manifested. Interesting, and unexplained, are the uniformed men to the side of the dance, looking on.
Intriguing, if perhaps not intentional, is the way only the men in the Archway to the Beirut Market are illuminated beyond the archway, out in the open, whereas the only women in the image can only be seen in black silhouette beneath the archway’s shelter. Intriguing is the image of the Horse Races which, without reading the caption, would be impossible to identify to anyone only familiar with the sight of a western horse race, with its three darkly clad men shot from behind, one of whom holds an open umbrella, and in the far distance, a row of spectators from end to end of the frame.
The rustic construction of the ferris wheel and the children’s swing made from a crate and ropes at the End of Ramadan Celebrations reflects the chaotic, ramshackle surroundings of this South Lebanese scene. What I love in the latter image is the filled crate resting on the stone wall and the woman’s leg clad in a high heeled shoe, visible from behind a boy who appears to hold a chain hanging from a tree around his neck with a sorrowful look on his face, and the little girl visible beneath the swing gazing off into the distance.
West meets east in the image of the Street Photographers of Triploi with their selfsame portraits advertised along the sides of their cameras, cloths hanging from the tripod leg, and the tiny portion of the cloth hanging on the wall behind the sitter as he adjusts his headdress. And the final image in this epic series is of Baalbek Village in the Bekka Valley that takes in land and sky in layer upon layer of mountains, valleys, plains, forests, ruins, village and stone; the whole, vast panorama surrounding a sole figure standing upon a rooftop, the image of humanity at the centre of a colossal and bewildering universe.
Once more we are shuttled from the depths to the heights in the images from London in the 60s. John Osborne takes us back to the beginning with the glamorous first image of Stafford as a young actress and singer. Here he is anything but the angry young man in his tuxedo, looking more like James Bond than the writer of Look Back in Anger. Albert Finney crumples into an already improbably small couch, his back shrunken along with the backrest, hiding behind smoking and supporting hands, his eyes hiding from contact with a conspicuous sideways glance. Who but Stafford and he know what Richard Attenborough is up to, looking like a tiger about to attack, looking dapper with his perfectly cut and combed hair and beard, in his pin-striped suit, with two garments behind him, one a light coloured overcoat, the other a silk, floral dressing gown, both reflecting his personality in the photo perfectly. Alan Bates’ eyes and mouth would seem at variance if not for those revealing hands, fingers playing nervously among themselves, the room so redolent of 60s London with its sash window. Lee Marvin lives up to “Lee Marvin” with his accusing fingers pinching a cigarette, and his cowboy boots beside the very British looking sofa that he sits cross-legged in beside a table holding among its items a pack of cigarettes and ash tray. The image of Patrick Moore is a brilliant one, the astronomer with the furrowed brow and clasped hands, gazing off into eternity with a vortex at his back, and the humorist in Jonathan Miller is caught mid-smirk with an artful look in his upturned eye. I love these images of 60s London, a time when London was truly great, and the image of Roger McGough standing aslant, poised and audacious, as the poetry of that time was, captures these “children of Albion” better than any. The dissonance of the tension in Roland Penrose’s expression and his easygoing posture in his chair at his desk, framed with the utmost organisation of books, art, and a well kept desk and plant give the impression of a life made robust by the combination of passion and routine. Contrasting with this brilliantly is the image of Jack Lindsay, his working space and dress rustic and in disarray, yet his expression is one of openness and warmth.
The images here of Sharon Tate are some of the most beautiful and most haunting, as a look of ghostly lifelessness pervades her features as she rests her cheek against the back of a floral wingbacked chair. I had never seen what the victim of the Manson Family murders looked like before seeing this image, and fell victim myself to the tyranny of beauty that makes of her death a tragedy intensified.
The images of Luciano Berio and Lorin Maazel, the former frozen in action while conducting his orchestra before an empty auditorium, brings into sharp relief the intense preparation that takes place in a vacuum before sublimity is unleashed on consumers of art.
A girl with her back to the camera in a large summer hat which she holds to her head, colourful leather jacket with an image of trees on it, tight, chequered hot pants, high heels, and seemingly wearing tights the colour and texture of porcelain, walks down a cobbled alleyway against an almost black brick wall, swinging a large teddybear by the leg. The image is eerie for the ambiguity of the girl’s age – or the age she intends to project - made more ominous by the presence of the bear. And in the image of the photographers among Stafford who surround the concealed cynosure, the viewer is confronted with a single female visible in the cracks of the photographers, her hands held behind her back, gazing on admiringly at the hidden model.
One of my favourite images of the entire collection is called Birds of the 70s, and is of a woman, sidelong in a shining dress and swimming cap a la jazz age. The flatness of the cap accentuates the protracted length of her face with its sleepy eyes and large, full lips, her dark hair falling in rings around her slender, naked shoulder. The lines of her body are exquisitely discernible through the fine weight of the dress, held close to her healthy frame with a slightly discordant belt. The image is beautiful and the dress is quite eye-catching – yet she is posed, haughtily with hand on hip, against a children’s climbing frame in a playground, in front of a wall covered in faded scribblings! It is a strange and wonderful image of flotsam and jetsam flowing into one another.
Barely anybody of my generation would guess that the living doll sat upon a window ledge with a ballerina’s delicacy is none other than one of the greatest comedy characters of all time, Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous! Here she is as light and graceful as a bird. And in the next image of her, sitting on the floor with three other models forming a semi-circle and facing inwards in discussion, Lumley appears to hold a mirror in her hand while drinking glasses adorn the floor. Behind the girls is a wardrobe filled with clothes, and to the side of it a cabinet containing folders among other things, displaying the mostly unseen organisational side of fashion. But the most interesting thing about this image by far is the third girl in from the left of the four who alone does not sit on the floor, but hovers above the floor in a tight squat, hugging her knees and clutching her elbows, abstracted, her gaze lost somewhere in the floor among the other girls’ legs, the image of profound insecurity and sadness.
Sadness there is also in the images of Twiggy as she is dwarfed by her own myth staring down at her, a single young lady reflecting her forlorn look, existentially lost. In the next image, the hand held to her head could be equally that of a pose or that of despair, the mascara of her lower lashes redolent of incipient tears.
The image from the dressing room at the Biba Boutique is probably my favourite Marilyn Stafford photograph. It is a confounding phantasmagoria of questions unanswered, as one flits between the unsettlingly androgynous appearance of the model at the centre of this mystery of reflections, and the mirror at the back that appears to reflect a completely different room from the one within the frame. With time, one can begin to put the pieces together…. But the initial surprise of finding one’s assumptions disproven, and the struggle to supersede them with the facts, makes this image an absolute feast of spacial contemplation and photographic riddling. Together with the sheer hallucinogenic scope of visual oddities and imaginative intrigues, this image offers everything anyone would need to fall in love with the existence of the truncated image.
The second image from the Biba Boutique, this time a simple fashion portrait, leaves the viewer free to admire the sheer finery of the clothing, mirrored in the interlacing fingers of the eidolic model.
At this point in the exhibition I am finally called away to the graduation, myself to be unhappily included in photographs for the occasion. But the next day I return, to find I was misinformed regarding my tickets power to regain me entry into the exhibition for the next year. But a gracious attendant lets me in, and once I deposit a copy of Marilyn Stafford’s A Life in Photography book behind the counter with the attendant to buy on my way out, I make my way back to finish the exhibition.
The image of the Taj Mahal in the distance, covered in netting and branches to camouflage from Pakistani air attacks, while in the foreground a scene of natural modesty and even economic deprivation goes quite unsheltered, speaks volumes, as a single cow trots sagely and obliviously towards the edge of the frame.
There is a lonely quality in the image of Indira Gandhi boarding her private plane, alone but for the photographer who receives her in the doorway, which serves as a frame for the image, as one only finds a handful of women among the sea of faces outside the plane and further afield. The light from a window suffuses her smiling features delicately as she offers a rose to a bedridden, hospitalised soldier who lays steeped in shadows gazing up at her, his expression one of what, we can’t say….
In another image, a smiling man stands upon the slightest of surfaces just to catch a glimpse of her…. The image of the congregation welcoming her open-topped motorcade is a chaos of jubilation at her approach…. That of her car backstage at a rally is like that of an automobile accident from the debris left by the offerings of flowers thrown by the crowds, while Pomp and Ceremony is an apt name for the discordance of unhappy, lifeless faces forced into uniforms, postures and formations…. But again, we are confronted with the stark isolation of the woman to the right of the frame, enclosed in her platform, in an image showing Gandhi addressing an ocean of bodies that stretch from the side of her back all the way across the to the opposing frame…. There seems to be a moment of timeless self-evaluation in her eyes as she looks off, her glasses held in one hand, sat at her desk covered in papers…. The gravity of hers and her families situation is made clear in the image of her grandson playing among the piled up sandbags, used to protect her home from bomb attacks. But the image also makes clear the all conquering, all-renewing power of the innocence and imagination of childhood. And lastly, the looks of the survivors of the war, especially that of the rape victim, are remarkable for their lack of bitterness and resentment.
And here concludes the exhibition of Marilyn Stafford’s life in photography, a life that lead from being in front of the camera, a symbol of glamour, distraction and irreality, to one behind the camera, and increasingly towards what Stafford herself describes as an oeuvre with a single aim: to cast a light on injustice and to tell stories that have something to say. And her images do just that. I leave the exhibition to buy my copy of Marilyn Stafford; A Life in Photography, taking in a long exchange with one of the gallery attendants, another photographer for whom Stafford’s exhibition “speaks to” him more than any other he has seen in all his years working at the Brighton Pavilion Art Gallery. And here I must make a confession that may be all too clear in my essay, that this is the first exhibition of visual art that has really spoken to me. Before coming to these two little rooms, it has been my shameful custom to simply drift through art galleries, doing my best to comprehend the import of what I am seeing, seizing on a piece here and there with great sentiment, but for the most part passing on none the wiser as to the mystery that surrounds me, only too happy to escape my ineptitude when I find myself in more mundane surroundings. But Marilyn Stafford’s Life in Photography is an exception to the rule exactly because her work leaves nothing mundane again. Everything the light touches within her frame breathes with life, and it is since becoming acquainted with her work that the everyday objects, scenes and figures of my life have taken on a new and illuminated import, glowing with a still emanation brimming with inner life that has made the once prosaic poetic. That is the power of placing a frame around given reality, and it is Stafford’s photographs that have first affected me in this way, leading me to see things with new eyes. Her work steals the neglected soul of the world in order that it may see itself finally.
