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OneGrassRoot

(22,917 posts)
Wed May 4, 2016, 08:17 AM May 2016

Marion Palfi: A Meditation on Race in Shades of White

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/a-meditation-on-race-in-shades-of-white/?_r=0

Ms. Palfi set out to document racism and segregation in Irwinton, Ga., the small town where Caleb Hill, in the first reported lynching of 1949, was murdered.

Juxtaposing portraits, Ms. Palfi’s written observations and interview excerpts, “There Is No More Time” chronicles the many faces and viewpoints of white supremacy in Irwinton: the obedience to God and family; the religious and pseudoscientific justifications for believing that black people were inherently inferior; the resentment of outside intervention in the South’s racial affairs; and the determination to protect the legal authority of white people.

The book also demonstrates that white racial attitudes were neither uniform nor without ambivalence. Some qualified their prejudices by also voicing disdain for poor whites. Others unconsciously revealed the insecurity and self-doubt that fueled their bitterness and, by extension, bigotry. Some discreetly criticized the biases of their neighbors, while others attacked them as traitors for doing so.

The town’s African-American residents appear in the book less frequently but to great dramatic effect. Their images make clear the tragic consequences of racial prejudice, their lives compromised and shattered in innumerable ways. This was no more evident than in the haunting portrait of Mr. Hill’s widow (image below) or in the text of an anonymous letter from black prisoners, unceasingly abused and dehumanized by their white jailers.








For some reason I can't post a direct link to her gallery (it is embedded in the article above), but here is a link to her page at the repository site, and from here you can click to access her full gallery:


http://ccp-emuseum.catnet.arizona.edu/view/people/asitem/P/0?t:state:flow=4a00aef0-c289-4c52-99a1-8337d20331b8


MARION PALFI

1907-1978
United States

Social documentary photographer Marion Palfi (1907–1978) sought equity, opportunity, and justice for all people, using her camera as a tool for that end. Farm Security Administration projects and the Photo League inspired her initial efforts toward reform, but for Palfi, the desire for social change was a lifelong pursuit.

Marion Palfi was born in Berlin in 1907 to a Hungarian father and a Polish mother. Her father, Victor Palfi, came from an aristocratic family and became an important producer-director in the German theater. Her parents provided her with an upper middle class life that included private schooling in both Berlin and Hamburg, where she learned English. She began studying dance at thirteen and eventually followed her father into a career on the stage. A lucrative modeling career and debut performances in film ensued.

After a short time in the limelight, however, she renounced her status as a privileged member of German society, and left the theater. She acquired a small folding camera and began a two-year apprenticeship at a Berlin portrait studio. By 1932, she opened a commercial portraiture and photojournalism studio. Palfi married a journalist and they traveled across Europe, but by the end of 1935 Palfi had opened a studio in Amsterdam alone. In 1940, just before Hitler’s army entered the Low Countries, she married an American serviceman and emigrated to New York.

Palfi gained employment in 1944, developing and retouching governmental war photographs at Pavelle Laboratories, and devoted evenings and weekends to her own photography. A crucial first project, “Great American Artists of Minority Groups and Democracy at Work,” was sponsored by the Council Against Intolerance in America. Through this assignment, she met Langston Hughes, the American poet, who became an ardent supporter. He would say of her work, “A Palfi photograph brings us face to face with hidden realities that its surface only causes us to begin to explore.” 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.
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Marion Palfi: A Meditation on Race in Shades of White (Original Post) OneGrassRoot May 2016 OP
I would like to read her book. brer cat May 2016 #1
People like Palfi make me wonder sometimes Kind of Blue May 2016 #2

brer cat

(24,401 posts)
1. I would like to read her book.
Wed May 4, 2016, 11:50 AM
May 2016

I've never been to Irwinton, but I am sure I would recognize it. Many of these small southern towns haven't changed significantly since my childhood and much earlier as far as racial issues are concerned. They live in a world apart where the sun doesn't often shine, thus enabling the white majority to continue abusive and unlawful practices unchecked.

Thanks for passing this along, OGR.

Kind of Blue

(8,709 posts)
2. People like Palfi make me wonder sometimes
Thu May 5, 2016, 09:16 AM
May 2016

specifically when they awakened or were they just born aware enough/motivated to do something becomes part of their life's mission, especially Palfi giving up such incredible comfort.

Thanks for posting.

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