A career that began remarkably: Stafford was invited to make stills of Albert Einstein. Between 1948 and 1980 she built an eclectic body of work — portraits of figures such as Twiggy and Henri Cartier-Bresson, fashion on the streets of Paris, and reportage. She worked in Italy, Lebanon and India, where in the early 1970s she photographed Indira Gandhi, the country's first and still only woman prime minister; that began a long fascination with India and further work among the Ghotul Muria and the Warli.

In 1949 she found herself in Paris as fashion was shifting from haute couture to ready-to-wear. Seeing it as a field more open to women, she began recording those early off-the-peg collections by Givenchy and Chanel, and preferred to take the models out into the streets where the women who actually bought the clothes would parade their luxury. The results are a crossover between high fashion and the street. In her free time she would ride a bus from one end of its route to the other, stopping off to make pictures; that is how she found the large slum of Cité Lesage-Bullourde, which she recorded extensively before its demolition.