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Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi By Janet Zandy RIT Press/Center for Creative Photography, 2013 208 pp./S34.99 (sb)
"Let the work speak. Let the work answer silence and invisibility. Situate the work in permeable time. Show how its presence contains a past and presages a future. Act as a steward of the work by interpreting, analyzing, theorizing, and contextualizing. Most important, connect the work to struggle" (xv). This is the mantra with which Janet Zandy, a scholar of working-class literature who for several years taught a course on "Photography and Writing" at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), begins her study of the work of two socially concerned documentarians who have been omitted from the standard histories of photography. Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi is the fruit of her exploration of the archives, housed at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona (which co-published this book with RIT Press), of two careers Zandy considers "remarkably parallel" (1) and her effort to puzzle out the uncanny coincidence of their many points of contact.
Mieth (1909-98) and Palfi (1907-78) never met, but both emigrated to this country from their native Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power, in 1930 and 1940 respectively (Palfi, who was Jewish, came via Holland). Both lived first in New York, then in California. Both recorded a litany of mid-century causes in strong humanist images, including the struggles of migrant laborers in California (Mieth and her photographer husband Otto Hagel, who often shared the camera and seem to have made little distinction between their...