Marion Palfi archive

Marion Palfi was born of Hungarian and Polish parents in Berlin, Germany, on October 21, 1907. Her father, Victor, was born into an aristocratic family, but was unwilling to engage in the kind of career expected of him. He escaped life as a monk (he was never ordained) to become an important German theatre director and producer. In her teens, Marion studied dance and worked as a much sought-after model and actress, appearing in several films. Given a small camera by a friend, she soon found accomplishment in her own creativity. Palfi apprenticed herself to a commercial portrait studio in Berlin and in 1934 she opened her own portrait studio there. She also worked as a freelance photographer for various German magazines, before being forced to leave Germany. Her portrait studio in Amsterdam was successful, but, as political events in Europe worsened, Palfi was determined to find more meaningful work elsewhere.

Arriving in the United States in 1940, Palfi took a job at a photofinishing and processing firm in Los Angeles to earn a living, saving evenings and weekends photographing for herself. It was during this time that her cumulative essay approach was first conceived. The Council Against Intolerance in America decided to sponsor Palfi’s study on minority artists and in March, 1945, her first one-woman exhibition opened at the Norlyst Gallery in New York with the title “Great American artists of minority groups and democracy at work.” Through this assignment, she met Langston Hughes, the American poet, who became an ardent supporter. Her close ties with Hughes allowed her to establish a circle of friends that included John Collier, Sr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward Steichen, and Lisette Model. A Ministry of Education Award and Julius Rosenwald Fellowship followed in 1945 and 1946 respectively. Palfi used the money from the Rosenwald Fellowship to travel throughout the United States photographing examples of racial discrimination.

Palfi’s photo essay on Jim Crow laws and lynching, “There is no more time,” was published in 1949. Palfi's book on child neglect and juvenile delinquency, Suffer little children, was published in 1952. Three years later Edward Steichen selected several of Palfi's photographs for his “Family of man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Involved in the campaign for African American civil rights, in the early 1960s Palfi used her Taconic Foundation grant to make a photographic record of voter registration in the South. In 1967 she received the Guggenheim Fellowship to document the lives of Native Americans. A retrospective exhibition of Palfi's work, Invisible in America, took place at the University of Kansas in 1973. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship in 1974. She was an instructor in Photographic Social Research at the Inner City Institute in Los Angeles, from 1971 until her death there in 1978.