Finding Lost Voices: The Haunting Photos of Hansel Mieth Tell Us Truths We May Not Want to See
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
Some artists make us look at things we may not want to see. Hansel Mieth (1909 - 1998) was a photographer who did just that. As her biography page at the Library of Congress reports, she “kept her eyes open and her lens trained on injustice.” When you think of photographers who documented the Great Depression, you likely think of Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) and her iconic photograph, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.” But, over the last few years, as I’ve been researching the 1930s and the plight of Dust Bowl refugees in California through the life of Sanora Babb, I’ve found Mieth’s intimate, haunting photographs that were taken as she lived and worked alongside the migrant workers in the fields of California. Why have you never heard of her? Well, the answer has a lot to do with why you haven’t heard about a lot of amazing photographers, authors, and artists who documented this era.
I first encountered Mieth’s work at the Sonoma County Museum when I was researching and writing my first biography on Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer where her later work, along with her husband Otto Hagel’s was on display. What I found were honest portraits of an older Kittredge, taken in the 1940s, photographs that, after five years of research, I had never seen. By this time, Kittredge had been a widow for several decades and was living at the House of Happy Walls in Glen Ellen. Mieth and her husband visited the Jack London Ranch on a pilgrimage. They’d grown up on Jack London’s writing, had recently bought a 550-acre farm near Santa Rosa, CA, and wanted to see where the famous writer once lived. Charmian gave them a full tour of the ranch, and they got to know her for the writer she was.
Mieth (named Joanna at birth) was born into a poor, religious family in Oppelsbohm, Germany (near Stuttgart). The events of WWI had gutted her father and her community. She was the oldest of three sisters. Her youngest sister, Maria became ill and died because the family couldn’t afford proper care. Due to this, Mieth spent her younger years dreaming of becoming a doctor “who loved and understood the poor.” Though she excelled in school, her teacher did not promote her because he thought scholarships were wasted on the poor. This trauma and discrimination she experienced as a child would later inform her photographic point of view.
When she was thirteen, her family moved to Fellbach, where she met another teenager named Otto Hägele (the man who would become her life partner and eventual husband). In a culture that was slowly being constricted by Nazi propaganda, both felt like outsiders. Together, they built a radio and learned about the outside world through the broadcasts. They found the works of Jack London and read voraciously. What they heard and read was so enticing that they realized they needed to see the world, so they forged their fathers’ signatures to obtain passports to explore it.
With their new passports in hand, the two teens fled their small town to tour Europe. Joanna changed her name to Hansel and dressed like a boy to avoid drawing attention to herself. She would go by Hansel for the rest of her life. They hopped on trains like their hero, Jack London, had done in his book, On the Road. They rode bicycles through France, Spain, and Italy; they walked through Austria, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, meeting strangers and learning about other ways of life. Along the way, they documented what they experienced by taking photographs and writing journals. These stories and photos would not only teach them the art of storytelling, they were sold to newspapers to fund their journey. By the time they returned to Fellenbach, Nazism had taken over their community. The teens were thought to be spies and pulled in multiple times for police questioning. They soon realized they’d have to get out to survive. In 1928, Otto found work on a merchant ship that left Bremen for America, jumped ship in Baltimore, and made his way to San Francisco. Mieth wasn’t as lucky. As a woman, she couldn’t just sign up to be a crew member on a ship. Instead, she worked twelve hours daily in a sewing factory until she could save enough for passage to the United States two years later.
Two years later, Mieth saved enough to buy passage and meet Otto in San Francisco. They could not find work in the city so they went south and began working in the fields alongside the other destitute workers looking for work. She and Otto became “fruit tramps” working the Central Valley fields with other immigrants and migrant workers who’d escaped the Dust Bowl. Mieth, who’d grown up poor, and had been discriminated against because she was poor, was able to see the people she worked amongst for who they were, showing their struggle to find a better life and not just depicting them as static victims in her photographs. Because they lived among the other migrants, working side by side, her photographs show how much her subjects trusted her.
Back in San Francisco, she submitted photos of the lives of migrant workers to the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They dismissed them as propaganda. However, Maurice Mendell of the Youth and Recreation Project reacted differently. He enthusiastically exclaimed, “These are exactly what we are looking for!” and gave Mieth free rein to photograph whatever her heart desired. Mieth documented the lives of the San Francisco immigrants, drawing her in. As an immigrant, she connected with these communities and took photographs where their authentic selves shine through, disarmed, and open. Then, when the Longshoreman went on strike in Oakland in 1934, Hansel got a big break. Her photographs of the strike (taken from the point of view of the strikers) caught the eye of Life Magazine, and Wilson Hicks invited her to become the second woman photographer on their staff (the other woman on staff was Margaret Bourke-White). After years of struggle, she and Otto were able to move to New York and finally devote themselves full-time to their art form.
At Life Magazine, she did her job, photographing the subjects Life sent her on location to photograph, including animals, cowboys, Native Americans, and Macy parades; however, she also used these assignments to take photographs that complicated the simplified stories often offered in Life. She recalled, “It was usually the worthless stories that cost the most in stamina, anger, and frustration.” Even limited by the constraints of magazine journalism, her photographs invited readers to imagine the story happening beyond the edge of her photographs. She often felt she was treated unprofessionally because she was a woman. And she had to fight to publish the depictions of social injustice she witnessed from behind the lens. For example, her intimate photograph essay of the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming was never published.
In 1941, Mieth and Otto, now American citizens, left New York City to return to the West Coast, where they purchased their ranch. They intended to continue working as freelance photographers but during the McCarthy Era, they were blacklisted, and Mieth’s assignments from Life began to dwindle until they just stopped. But, before she left, Mieth went on a last assignment: she and Otto returned to Fellbach. Germany to record the devastation her community had faced during the war.
In Sonoma County, CA, even without backing a media outlet, Mieth continued to document those who were voiceless in their rural community, including the Coast Miwok and Pomo. As she recalled, “living on the land…that formerly belonged to Native Peoples, we naturally became interested in ‘Indians.’ As with most American Indians, conditions are deplorable. They live in outlying Reservations and Rancherias.” Her photo essays document all aspects of life for this community, including funerals for those killed in the Vietnam War and the craft of Pomo basket making. In one photo, she captures Maggie Wahoo, a 106-year-old blind master basket maker who could still recognize her work and the work of all the other great basket makers just by touch. In 1973, Otto had a stroke and died. Hansel lived on her ranch for another twenty-five years before she died at 88.
For more information about Hansel Mieth, see my previous article about her for FF2 Media. Or watch the film, “Hansel Mieth”. You can see twenty of Mieth’s photographs at the Library of Congress.
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Thanks, Iris. A powerful story. Glad to hear it.
Similar story--but different, of course, Vishniac, whose photos documented the lost world of the Jewish population of Poland right before WWII.