DIMBOLA’S summer show is a retrospective of decades of archive photography by 96 year old Sussex photographer Marilyn Stafford.

Following her popular exhibition, A Fashion Retrospective, which was held at Dimbola in 2020, the museum is delighted to showcase the special touring exhibition, A Life in Photography.

Works come from an international archive spanning four decades, and include celebrity portraits, fashion shoots, street photography, humanitarian stories and newspaper reportage.

This exhibition provides a look at a period of 20th century history through the photographer’s unique gaze.

It will feature many of the stories from her career, with images never seen before by the public and specially organised expanded content such as a film about Marilyn’s life and more.

Marilyn Stafford’s photography career got off to a remarkable start when she was invited, as a young woman, to take stills of Albert Einstein.

Since then, she has accumulated an eclectic body of work, spanning from 1948-1980, including further portraits of famous and influential figures such as Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mulk Raj Anand, Indira Gandhi, Albert Finney, Twiggy and Joanna Lumley.

She has also photographed many ordinary people like the illiterate Sicilian peasant woman, Francesca Serio, who took the Mafia to trial for murdering her son.

Stafford has also engaged in street photography, mainly in the 1950s, documenting the Parisian children of the Cité Lesage-Bullourde neighbourhood living in slum housing conditions as well as the bustling, and sometimes downtrodden, street life of Boulogne-Billancourt.

Stafford has witnessed some significant, and sometimes turbulent, periods of modern social and political history — she photographed Algerian refugees in Tunisia fleeing the Algerian War of Independence in 1958 which gained her front page of the Observer.

Alongside her humanitarian focused photography, Stafford took advantage of opportunities open to her as a female photographer, including commissioned portraits and fashion runways for British, American and international newspapers and magazines.

Dr Brian Hinton, executive chair of Dimbola, said: “We are honoured to show a major retrospective of Marilyn’s extraordinary life journey. She is undoubtedly one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century."

An accompanying retrospective book of her work Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography will be available from the shop.

The exhibition runs from June 10 to September 18.