MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Throughout her career, immigrant photographer Marion Palfi’s work focused on various “othered” Americans. If her early work in the United States was particularly attentive to the American Negro, that so common focus of the European gaze, one of her least known if most passionate commitments was to the Native Americans. Her photographic and journaling work among various tribes during the late 1960s, funded in part through a Guggenheim grant, culminated in a mocked-up book (never published) archived at the Center for Creative Photography. Here Palfi united her sense of the “othered” and her concern with efforts to normalize the Native American.

The proposed paper takes as its starting point Palfi’s work on the Madera, California, Employment Training Center, a residential adjustment program run through the Philco-Ford Corporation for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Here Native Americans might spend three to twelve months being prepared to function as “normal” Americans. For Palfi the project proved the nadir of the American blindness both to the needs of the Native American (too often thus resulting in a maladjusted transplant to the American city) and to the flawed, materialistic American standard being promulgated.

The paper explores Palfi’s stance—through her photography and writing—as that of a censorious outsider watching her adopted country’s effort at normalization of its native peoples. Through consideration of the Madera program (in the context of related BIA- or Department of Education-centers at Roswell and Missoula), the paper argues that Palfi’s determined outsider gaze in observing and framing this mid-century effort to improve the socio-economic status of the Native American is not without its own baggage.