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Marion Palfi archive

 Collection
Identifier: AG 46

Scope and Contents

Papers and photographic materials, 1920s - 1983, relating to the career of Marion Palfi (1907 - 1978), photographer. The bulk of this collection documents her activities as a photographer, teacher, researcher, and social critic during the period from 1945 to 1978. There is little documentation of her first career in Germany as an actress, model, and dancer. The correspondence contains letters, telegrams, and postcards between Palfi and friends, photographers, scholars, writers, publishers, and governmental and private institutions. Subjects include personal matters, her philosophy of using photography to influence social change, her sales of photographs, and her efforts to publish her works.

The activity files contain correspondence, brochures, handwritten and typed manuscripts, articles, books, catalogs, clippings, resumes, scrapbooks, course outlines, reference notes, and other items relating to biographical material about Palfi, her exhibitions from 1945 to 1983, photography courses taught by her in New York and Los Angeles, miscellaneous reference files, and publications which featured her from 1932 to 1983.

Marion Palfi believed that her photographs could improve the existing order of American society. The photographic project files contain correspondence, field notes, clippings, research material, work prints, manuscripts, and maquettes for proposed books relating to her projects from 1945 to 1978. These projects explored problems in post-war America: race relations, discrimination in rural towns and urban cities, child neglect and juvenile delinquency, the treatment of the elderly, the condition of Native Americans on reservations and in urban ghettos, and elements of the criminal justice system. The photographic materials consist of study prints, contact sheets, and negatives which relate to her projects as well as some portraits and her early photographic work in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dates

  • circa 1920s-1983

Creator

Language of Materials

Material in English

Conditions Governing Access

To access materials from this collection, please contact CCP-RefDesk@email.arizona.edu

Conditions Governing Access

The negatives in boxes 8, 9, and 10 are currently inaccessible due to renovations in CCP's cold storage facility. Negatives will be accessible once the renovation is complete and the negative boxes have been transferred to the new frozen storage space. The estimated date of availability is mid-year of 2023, although not guaranteed. Please be sure to email CCP-RefDesk@email.arizona.edu with any questions or for updates.

Conditions Governing Use

It is the responsibility of the user to obtain permission from the copyright owner (which could be the institution, the creator of the record, the author or his/her transferees, heirs, legates or literary executors) prior to any copyright-protected uses of the collection.

The user agrees to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the Arizona Board of Regents, the University of Arizona, Center of Creative Photography, including its officers, employees, and agents, from and against all claims made relating to copyright or other intellectual property infringement

Biographical Note

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.

Extent

83 Linear Feet (98 boxes)

Metadata Rights Declarations

  • License: This record is made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons license.

Abstract

Papers and photographic materials, 1920s - 1983, relating to the career of Marion Palfi (1907 - 1978), photographer. The bulk of this collection documents her activities as a photographer, teacher, researcher, and social critic during the period from 1945 to 1978. There is little documentation of her first career in Germany as an actress, model, and dancer. The correspondence contains letters, telegrams, and postcards between Palfi and friends, photographers, scholars, writers, publishers, and governmental and private institutions. Subjects include personal matters, her philosophy of using photography to influence social change, her sales of photographs, and her efforts to publish her works.

Arrangement

The Collection is arranged into the following series:

  1. Series 1: Correspondence, undated, 1940-1978
  2. Series 2: Activity files, circa 1920-1983
  3. Series 3: Photographic project files, 1945-1978
  4. Series 4: Other materials, 1920-1978
  5. Series 5: Photographic materials, circa 1930-1975

Custodial History

This collection was a gift to the Center from Palfi's husband, Martin Magner, and the Menninger Foundation in 1982.

Related Materials

AG 130 contains the Marion Palfi Miscellaneous Acquisitions collection. Additional information on Palfi’s theatrical career and the theatrical materials in her archive can be found in AG130.

Processing Information

Processed by by Robert Sorgenfrei and David Peters, 1985. Electronic version of the finding aid prepared by Amy Rule, June 1998.

Collection rehoused by Meghan Jordan, summer 2016. Finding aid updated by Meghan Jordan and Alexis Peregoy, July 2016.

Title
Marion Palfi archive circa 1920s - 1983
Status
Completed
Author
Meghan Jordan and Alexis Peregoy
Date
© 2022
Description rules
Finding Aid Based On Dacs (Describing Archives: A Content Standard)
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin
Language of description note
Finding aid encoded in English
Edition statement
Finding aid was added to ArchivesSpace in 2021.

Repository Details

Part of the Center for Creative Photography Archives Repository

Contact:
1030 N. Olive RD
Tucson Arizona 85721 United States