UNFINISHED STORIES: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi by Janet Zandy (review)

Janet Zandy’s Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi is an exciting and thoughtful text that recovers the biographies and perspectives of two significant, yet little-remembered social documentary photographers. Mieth (1909–1988) and Palfi (1907–1978) were both German immigrants who devoted their lives to documenting and witnessing. Their work exists in the grey region between art and photojournalism. At great personal and professional risk, they photographed impoverished people during the Depression, citizens at Japanese internment camps, African Americans in the South, Native Americans in the West, and women with children. Actively trying to expose “the underbelly of racism, poverty, and human waste in the American landscape,” Mieth and Palfi used their facility with images to reveal those lives “battered by circumstance.”

Mieth and Palfi were participants within a long shadow of cultural productions from the start of the 1930s—literature, jazz, photography, musical theater, film, and visual art—that show a vibrant patchwork of Communist and left-leaning ideologies that promoted an egalitarian society through both culture and through social services, especially in New York City. Meanwhile, the apartheid system of white supremacy, most explicit in the Southern states, made the vision of shining diversity a fantasy for many Americans.

Zandy makes a convincing historiographic case as to why these two photographers ought to be paired and interrogated together. She says that the photographs are a “visual memory of Americans”; this memory is in “their language, and reflects their understanding of America as an unfinished story. They engaged visual art as resistance to domination in kinship with the least powerful.” The social laboratory of American life manifested itself often in physical form: the cultural expressions of the words of everyday people, and the images of their faces and the landscapes of their workaday lives, captured by such documentary photographers. These visual records are essentially the physical manifestations of memories, and therefore are good ways to bridge the ideals espoused by the New Deal.

Using close readings of photographs, traditional biography, historical context of their German upbringing, and oral histories with both artists, Zandy’s work situates this astounding, and beautiful work in the story of social documentary photography, itself a rich history—especially for women photographers—that reaches from Dorothea Lange to Helen Stummer. For scholars, the insights Zandy has into documentary photographers like Mieth and Palfi, who emerged either directly or indirectly from the New Deal, give readers an opportunity to be more compassionate and hopeful about the potential of the American experiment.

Unfinished Stories should be in the library of anyone interested in American photography, mid-century artists, and the “pursuit of the myriad interrelationships between art and justice.” Since they “built their personas and hid or disclosed their private lives and interior selves” with their work, social documentary photography serves both as witness, anodyne, and active self-portraiture. This is a terrific and provocative book.