Palfi, Marion
Biographical Statement
Socially conscious photographer Marion Palfi (1907-1978) had a distinguished career capturing some of America’s most poignant historical moments in the latter half of the twentieth century. Emigrating from Europe in 1940 after marrying an American serviceman, Palfi quickly began working in the field of photography.
Marion Palfi, born in Berlin in 1907, was the daughter of a Hungarian father and a Polish mother. She was educated in private schools in Berlin and Hamburg, where she studied dance. Like her father, Palfi began a career on the stage and in film. She soon left the theater and renounced her upper middle class life. She apprenticed with a Berlin portrait studio after taking up photography, and by 1932 had opened a portraiture and photojournalism studio. Palfi married, and she and her husband, a journalist, traveled Europe. However, by the end of 1935 Palfi had opened a photography studio in Amsterdam by herself. In 1940, just prior to Adolf Hitler's invasion of the Low Countries, Palfi married an American serviceman and immigrated to New York.
By 1945, Palfi was living on the eastside of Manhattan and taking photographs of New York's landscape and people. Just prior to the end of World War II, Palfi photographed numerous photos of New York hospital buildings, universities, and life in and around the neighborhood known as Harlem. Palfi's photo featuring the Henry Street Settlement on New York's Lower East Side, was printed on the front cover of Ebony magazine's first issue in November 1945.
In the same year, Palfi also photographed images of Southern African American life and captured laborers, farmers, and segregation signs during the Jim Crow period. The German emigre's documentation of the American South continued over the next two decades as Palfi photographed American Missionary Association (AMA) schools and poignant moments during the Civil Rights Movement.
By 1950, the photographic study Palfi conducted on the state of Georgia, and funded in part by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, was exhibited across the United States. The exhibit, entitled Children in America, was displayed at the Institute of Race Relations, an annual lecture series offered by the Race Relations Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The exhibit also traveled to cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Washington D.C., and was instrumental in garnering legislative changes on behalf of American children after the "American Parents Committee" showed Palfi's photographs to members of Congress and the Senate.
Palfi's most widely-known work was her 1952 book Suffer Little Children, which depicted photographs of children, some living in deplorable conditions, around the United States. After the book's publication, the Race Relations Department requested numerous copies of her book for exhibition. In 1954, Palfi married the Los Angeles director Martin Magner.
Palfi's social documentarian style continued in her 1959 work, You Have Never Been Old, displayed throughout New York and formally presented at the New School Art Center in 1962. In 1963, Palfi photographed major moments in the Civil Rights Movement beginning with her study of Greenwood, Mississippi. With the help of Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, Palfi was the first photographer to arrive in Greenwood to document the town's civil rights protests and social unrest. While in Greenwood, Palfi photographed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) offices that were burned down and even went to the residence of Dewy Green, an African American student who had applied to the University of Mississippi, after his home had been riddled with bullets.
In Greenwood, Palfi met with activists and witnessed protest songs sung in crowded churches. However, the situation in Greenwood was so dangerous that Palfi was not able to take any more photographs and was advised to leave Greenwood at once. Palfi described her experiences in the unpublished notes entitled The Only Photographer in Greenwood, Mississippi. As a result of this study, her photographs were used by the United States Department of Justice to bring lawsuits aimed at eradicating segregation in the town of Greenwood and Leflore County.
Shortly after Palfi left Greenwood, she received a Taconic Foundation Grant, in the amount of $7,500, to document the "new protest" movements and "Negro leadership and the Negro community" across the South. The funds and project were both administered by the Race Relations Department at Fisk, and was entitled, Ten Years After (also known as That May Affect Their Hearts and Minds). Before Palfi received her first advance from the Taconic grant, she attended the August 28, 1963, March on Washington. After returning from the March on Washington, Palfi then went to Farmville, Virginia, to photograph the opening of Prince Edward County schools, followed by Charleston to meet with the prominent South Carolinian Civil Rights leader Esau Jenkins. Palfi also marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma in 1965.
In 1967, Palfi received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her study First I Liked the Whites, I Gave Them Fruits to document the relocation of Native Americans. The first comprehensive exhibition of Palfi's work was done in 1973 at the University of Kansas Museum of Art, which resulted in the publication, Invisible in America: An Exhibition of Photographs. By 1974, Palfi received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to document the U.S. prison system. In her later years, before succumbing to breast cancer in 1978, Palfi taught photography at the Inner-City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, California. After her death, her husband, Martin Magner donated the bulk of her papers to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. Most recently, some of Palfi's photographs were on display at an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. The museum's exhibit entitled, The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951, ended in March of 2012.