Photographs of the exhibition
Exhibition Catalogue
Press Reviews
Photographic Memories – Lost Corners of Paris: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, 1949-50
Mémoires photographiques des coins perdus: Les Enfants de la Cité Lesage-Bullourde et Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949-54
Alliance Française gallery exhibition, Toronto, March 8th 2017 – April 3rd 2017
Exhibition curated by Julia Winckler with the assistance of a SSHRC research grant, From streets to playgrounds
Mémoires photographiques des coins perdus: Les Enfants de la Cité Lesage-Bullourde et Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris 1949-54
This exhibition brought to the Alliance Française Toronto, a series of compelling, rarely seen photographs taken between 1949 and 1954 by photographer Marilyn Stafford in post war Paris.
Internationally published, Marilyn grew up during the 1930s in Cleveland, Ohio USA. In December 1948 Marilyn moved to Paris via New York, and briefly sang with a small music ensemble at Chez Carrère near the Champs Elysees. 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. Her interest in street photography let her to ‘wander about the streets making photographs. It was not long after the end of the war and very few people had cameras.’ Marilyn photographed the neighbourhoods of the Bastille and Boulogne-Billancourt and her images of children from Cité Lesage-Bullourde near the Place de la Bastille featured in the Alliance Française exhibition provide rare insights into the daily lives of children in one of Paris’ poorest neighbourhoods. Marilyn recalls her first impressions: ‘What I found was lots of children in the streets; there were no playgrounds for them to go to; the children were curious about me, friendly, open and warm – they just gathered round’.
Gallery installation
Click images to view in carousel
Unlike Cité Lesage-Bullourde, now long gone, and its residents, who got dispersed, the contact sheets, photographs and negatives remain frozen and suspended in time, making it possible for contemporary viewers to explore the traces of the lives Marilyn recorded.
Exhibition curated by Julia Winckler (University of Brighton), with accompanying texts by Julia Winckler and Adrienne Chambon (University of Toronto), and a short film about Marilyn Stafford’s early Parisian work by Ian Hockaday.
With the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the Government of Canada, this exhibition is organized in conjunction with the co-curated exhibition ‘From Streets to Playgrounds, Representations of Children in Early 20th Century Toronto’, featuring archival photographs of Toronto’s Ward area, which reopens March 17th, 2017 at the City of Toronto Archives Gallery.
Exhibition Catalogue
A new documentary film by Ian Hockaday about Marilyn Stafford’s early career and years spent in Paris has been made especially for this exhibition (2017).
To accompany the exhibition, this catalogue includes an introductory essay by Julia Winckler (University of Brighton, School of Media), and a contextual essay about the Bastille area by Professor emerita Adrienne Chambon (University of Toronto).
View a PDF of the illustrated Exhibition Catalogue
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, allowing them to be enlarged to reveal 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.
Photographic Memories – Lost Corners of Paris: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, 1949-1954
Julia Winckler, University of Brighton, February 2017
Press Reviews
