Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon - In the Darkroom

2016, English, Stefánie Faludi, Susan Faludi,

Full title: "In The Darkroom" by Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon.

This book is an ambitious undertaking by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Susan Faludi. It begins when her father asks her to write his biography. But this is no simple request.

She has had a difficult and strained, at times estranged, relationship with him. He is controlling with a capital C. He is manipulative. He treated her mother and the family horribly after her mother filed for divorce. He contacted her in 2004. He was living in his birthplace of Budapest and at age 76 had sex reassignment surgery. Steven is now Stefani. The author flies to Hungary multiple times in an effort to learn more about him and about her family. Stefani is a recalcitrant and evasive interview subject.

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.

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