Marion Palfi was a German-American social-documentary photographer born in Berlin, who moved to the United States in 1940..
Early Life
Palfi was the daughter of German theater designer, Victor Palfi, and a Polish mother. She studied dance at private schools in Germany, and as a young woman she worked as a model, dancer, and actress, appearing in at least one film in 1926. In rejection of Germany's radical politics, she began to use photography and art to effect social change.
Career
In 1932, Palfi became an apprentice at a commercial portrait studio in Berlin and also began working as a freelance magazine photographer. Two years later, she opened her own portrait studio there. Fleeing the Nazis in Berlin, she opened her own successful portrait studio in Amsterdam in 1936. She then fled Europe for the United States in 1940 after marrying an American soldier. In the U.S., Palfi supported herself by working in a photo-finishing lab in New York City and began working on a large project of photographic essays celebrating American minority artists. Great American Artists of Minority Groups opened doors for her: after meeting Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, Palfi was asked to photograph for a number of African American Causes. One of her photographs was published on the cover of the first issue of Ebony magazine, featuring the Henry Street Settlement of New York's Lower East Side. Palfi was granted an award from the Rosenwald Fellowship in 1946. Between the years of 1946-1949, Palfi used photography to catalog racial discrimination in the United States. Palfi's photographic study on the State of Georgia was hosted as an exhibit around the United States in 1950, including Nashville, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Her work was used to garner legislative change when "The American Parents Committee" showed her photographs to members of Congress. From the mid-1960s to the 1970s, Palfi taught photography in Los Angeles. Institutions where she worked included the California Institute of the Arts, the Woman's Building, UCLA Extension, and the Inner City Cultural Center. Palfi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1974.
Photography
Marion Palfi's work centered around equity, opportunity, and justice for all people. In her photo book There is No More Time: An American Tragedy, Palfi documented racism and segregation in Irwinton, GA, the site of the murder of Caleb Hill, the first reported lynching of 1949. Palfi's 1952 book Suffer Little Children focused on the living condition of disadvantaged children across the U.S., including the young inmates of the New York Training School for Girls. Palfi was a contributing photographer to Edward Steichen's landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955.
