Unfinished Stories

Unfinished Stories presents a parallel study of the lives and narrative photography of Hansel Mieth (1909-1998) and Marion Palfi (1907-1978). Mieth was the second woman staff photographer employed by Life magazine. Palfi'sphoto of Henry Street Settlement kids was the first cover of Ebony magazine. German born emigres who never met, they constructed remarkably similar photo narratives of unseen America. They were visual storytellers, artists, and citizen-photographers who do not fit easily into contemporary categories of photojournalism or documentary photography. Great risk-takers, they grasped the complexities inherent in representing human beings as individuals, as part of an ethnic, racial or labor group, and as citizens colonized in their own land. They may have photographed the circumstances of alienation, but their themes involved connection, human relationships, and solidarity.

Unfinished Stories offers a fresh and theoretically informed eye on representational photography. It forges a place for Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi in the history of photography and in the history of American race and class struggle.