Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon - In de donkere kamer

2016, Dutch, Stefánie Faludi, Susan Faludi,

"In de donkere kamer" is the Dutch language edition of Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon's bestseller "In the Darkroom".

Let me quote the 2016 article from The New York Times: ""In the Darkroom" is Faludi's rich, arresting and ultimately generous investigation of her father, who died in 2015. It is partly an inquiry into the meaning of gender, a subject Faludi, the famous feminist, sees very differently from Stefánie, who hewed to traditional notions of masculinity and femininity both as an overbearing patriarch and as a coquettish old woman."

"But in trying to understand her inscrutable father — Jewish Holocaust survivor and Leni Riefenstahl fanatic, man and woman, a sly fantasist whose tallest tales turn out to be true — Faludi transcends feminist debate. The book, which traces the decimation of her father's prosperous, assimilated Jewish clan during World War II, his improbable survival and then reinvention in Denmark, Brazil, and America, and his gender metamorphosis at 76, becomes a complex act of forgiveness."

Stefánie Faludi was the father of Susan Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and feminist author. She was born Steven Faludi, a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust in Hungary and later immigrated to the United States. In 2004, at the age of 76, she underwent sex reassignment surgery in Thailand and became Stefánie Faludi. Susan Faludi wrote a memoir about her father's life and transition, titled "In the Darkroom", which was published in 2016. The book explores the themes of identity, gender, history, and family, as well as the complex relationship between Susan and Stefani Faludi.

As a photographer, Stefánie Faludi Faludi worked in various genres and media, from documentary to commercial, from film to digital. Her daughter Susan Faludi also wrote an article for the New York Times, where she reflected on her father's work and identity as a photographer. She described how her father used photography as a way of altering and expressing herself, from her early days as a boy in Budapest to her later years as a woman in Thailand. She also analyzed how photography was used and abused in Hungary, both during the Holocaust and in the present day, to manipulate and erase the truth. Susan Faludi's writing about her father's photography is a powerful and insightful examination of the complex relationship between image and identity. Stefánie Faludi died in 2015 at the age of 87.

Available via hebban.nl

and nytimes.com

Photo via nytimes.com