Skip to main content

Mémoires photographiques des coins perdus: Les Enfants de la Cité Lesage-Bullourde et Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949-54: photographer Marilyn Stafford's work in Toronto

Marilyn Stafford Alliance Francaise Exhibition March 8th – April 3 2017 Toronto


Mémoires photographiques des coins perdus: Les Enfants de la Cité Lesage-Bullourde et Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949-54

Much travelled and internationally published photographer Marilyn Stafford grew up during the 1930s in Cleveland, Ohio USA. In December 1948, Marilyn moved to Paris via New York, and in 1951 briefly sang with a small music ensemble at Chez Carrère near the Champs Elysées. At the club she met Edith Piaf and also became friends with Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who both encouraged her work as a photographer.

Between 1949 and the mid 1950s, Marilyn made photographs in several different Parisian neighbourhoods. Her compelling images of children from Cité Lesage-Bullourde near the Place de la Bastille, provide rare insights into the daily lives of children in one of Paris’ poorest districts.

Marilyn’s photographs of the children who made these streets their playground, document a community whose lives and experiences had been completely underrepresented. Her ability to engage with them provides for posterity captivating visual traces of a vanished neighbourhood, long dispersed when the area was eventually demolished and gentrified.

The exhibition also features photographs taken in Boulogne-Billancourt and Marilyn’s pioneering fashion work, which for the first time took models out of the studio and onto the streets, applying a social documentary approach to the fashion shoot.



The few surviving contact sheets, negatives and prints from Marilyn’s archive of this period have been digitized and painstakingly repaired by Julia Winckler, University of Brighton, who is curator of the exhibit. This process allowed for the images to be enlarged revealing new detail.  The archival material also has a life of its own, revealing Marilyn’s working practices, her photographic eye, and the editorial choices she made by cropping and cutting, making marks with crayons and stapling contact sheets and individual images together. They have the patina of time embedded within them and contain multiple stories as we encounter and hold the gaze of the children Marilyn photographed. Accompanied by a film made by Ian Hockaday – shown as part of the exhibit.

Julia Winckler  February 2017




Exhibition curated by Julia Winckler (with the support of SSHRG Canada From Streets to Playgrounds) and with an exhibition brochure with texts by Prof. Adrienne Chambon (University of Toronto) and Julia Winckler. Exhibition take place in conjunction with a co-curated exhibition (with colleagues Adrienne Chambon, Ernie Lightman, Bethany Good (University of Toronto) and Vid Ingelevics and Mary Anderson (Ryerson) at the City of Toronto Archives gallery that focuses on historical representations of children in Toronto’s Ward area and relaunches on 20 March.

Radio program with Radio Canada's Line Boily here: 

http://ici.radio-canada.ca/emissions/L_heure_de_pointe_Toronto/2015-2016/archives.asp?date=2017-03-07

Private view March 8th 2017 (film screening Ian Hockaday)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Terry Dennett (1938-2018) Photographer & Social Historian

  Terry Dennett, who passed away recently, would have turned 80 on 4 February. There will be a service at the Islington Crematorium, 278 High Road, East Finchley, at 11 a.m. on Wednesday 7 February.  We first met at TPW - Toronto Photographer's Workshop, at a comprehensive Jo Spence retrospective in 1997, where Terry was speaking about the legacy of her work and their collaborations. Over the next 20 years, Terry became a mentor and dear friend, always sharing his wide ranging photographic knowledge generously.  Terry Dennett in 2012 at Jo Spence (Part 1) in London, Space Studios Training originally as a painter, for decades Terry worked as staff photographer at the London Zoo, where he had a colour and black & white darkroom and a 9 to 5 job. He also had, what he referred to as his second 5 to 9 job, and would regularly collaborate on projects with researchers, including Shaheed Macgregor, on Eating Rough, Sleeping Rough, a pop-up exhibit...
1 comment
Read more

Art-Exit: 1939 A very different Europe Invitation to upcoming talk Collar the Lot @ 12 Star Gallery, London

The Lecture Series ART-EXIT: 1939 A VERY DIFFERENT EUROPE   Ben Uri Gallery and Museum is delighted to present a special series of free evening talks at Europe House, 32 Smith Square, SW1P 3EU. These flow from the recent exhibition by the Ben Uri Research Unit, marking the contribution to art in Britain by the so-called ‘Hitler emigres’ on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. Spread over consecutive Thursdays in October, a range of distinguished experts engage with topics that continue to resonate deeply within our globalised society: identity, migration, displacement and internment - and the power of art to reflect and respond to these issues. Each talk will be preceded by refreshments and followed by an audience Q&A.         REGISTER     17 October 2019, 6.30 p.m. "Collar the lot!" Artists, Aliens and Aspects of Internment in Britain c. 1940 Prof Cha...
Post a Comment
Read more