Educational Media Reviews Online

While Hansel Mieth may not be as well known as her photojournalist counterpart, Margaret-Bourke White, she occupies an importance place in photographic history. The two women were the only female photographers on Life Magazine’s staff during the 1930’s.

Along with their peers, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, both Mieth and Bourke-White were compelled to speak through their cameras about the economic and social hardships of the Great Depression, unfair labor conditions, discrimination, and totalitarianism. Mieth states that”she had a great hatred toward exploitation.”

Born in German in 1909, Mieth immigrated to America in 1930 with her husband, Otto Hagel, who was also a photographer. Both openly expressed their disapproval of Nazism. They traveled West to California and documented the migrant field workers who were being paid substandard wages. The couple worked along side the workers and cultivated their trust so that the photographers could make historical documents of the migrants’ horrendous living and working conditions. One commentator says that “she had the capacity to make people trust her.”

As a progressive and left-inclined liberal, Mieth was particularly concerned about the strikes that the farm workers organized in Salinas to shut down the trains so that they could demand decent wages. Mieth captured the brutal treatment of the police as they tear-gassed the strikers. Her striking night photographs accentuate the chaos and violence of the scene.

In San Francisco, Mieth became well-known as a photographer who photographed the building of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Longshoreman’s Strike of 1934, and the internment of Japanese-Americans to Heart Mountain, Wyoming where they lived in concentration camp.

Unfortunately, Mieth’s images did not sit well with the Luce/Life empire after World War II and she lost her staff member status. In addition, she told the House Committee on Un-American Activities to”go to hell” when she was questioned. She was blacklisted during the 1950’s. Mieth should now be recognized and honored for her commitment to showing what social injustice looks like and her truth-seeking point-of-view in documenting society’s ills.

My only criticism is that the filmmakers should have subtitled much of the interview. Mieth’s heavy German accent made it hard to understand her words.