Sadly, more great photographers died this year. Here’s our tribute – as photographers we are always standing on the shoulders of giants who’ve gone before
Marilyn Stafford (b. 1925)
Marilyn Stafford’s name will be well known to many AP readers, as she received our Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Her photographic career got off to a remarkable start when she was invited to take stills of Albert Einstein by friends who were interviewing the physics genius for a documentary film. In the car they handed Stafford, a photographic novice, a 35mm camera, along with a crash course on how to use it. Her subsequent images were very well received. In December 1948 she moved to Paris and befriended Robert Capa, who suggested she become a war photographer (a suggestion that didn’tappeal) and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cartier-Bresson encouraged Stafford to take photographs on the streets of Paris, advice she fortuitously followed.Stafford accumulated an eclectic body of work, which spans from 1948 to 1980.
Her photographs include further portraits of famous and influential figures such as Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Indira Gandhi, Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley. She also photographed many ordinary people, such as the illiterate Sicilian peasant, Francesca Serio, who took the Mafia to trial for murdering her son.
Stafford witnessed some of the 20th century’s most turbulent events, including Algerian refugees in Tunisia fleeing the war of independence in 1958 – this gained her front page of the Observer. Beyond documentary work, she set up a fashion photography agency, and later the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage award, to support professional women photographers. ‘I think of myself as a storyteller, speaking through the lens of my camera,’ Stafford observed. ‘I have always endeavoured to find a way to bring awareness to the public eye, to tell stories that are socially relevant and to create change for the better.’
Elliott Erwitt (b. 1928)
One of the biggest names in street and documentary photography, Elliott Erwitt died in November aged 95. Erwitt was a mercurial, enigmatic figure who is often fondly remembered for his photographs of dogs, but he also shot some of the biggest names of the 20th century. These include Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara, along with a moving portrait of Jackie Kennedy at the funeral of John F Kennedy in 1963.
It’s a prophetic image: she’s flanked by an army officer, apt considering the later horror of the Vietnam war, and Bobby Kennedy, who was himself assassinated in 1968.
Erwitt was born in Paris to Russian parents, but a fortuitous move to the US aged ten meant he
