In San Francisco, German immigrant Hansel Mieth became a pioneering female photojournalist, creating some of the most indelible images of mid-20th century America.
Together with her life partner Otto Hagel, Hansel Mieth (born in 1909 in Fellbach near Stuttgart) decided to dodge the approaching National Socialist movement and headed for San Francisco in 1931. It was in the midst of the Great Depression: people were without jobs and broke. Mieth and Hagel survived by accepting any work they could find. From this perspective, they began to focus their cameras on the everyday life of poor people surrounding them - migrant day laborers, workers on cotton plantations, unemployed and ethnic minorities. Furthermore they captured images of the general strike in 1934, which won wide recognition. As a result, the internationally recognized magazine LIFE became interested in Mieth and hired her as photojournalist (Hagel, however, remained a lifetime freelance photographer). Eventually, Mieth courageously carved out an impressive career in the male-dominated world of photojournalism. She continued documenting the casualties of social injustice — from Depression-era hardships to the alarming assault on civil liberties in Japanese-American internment camps. These works appeared in virtually every pictorial magazine in the world. At the end of the 1940’s, as victims of the McCarthy-inquisition, Mieth and Hagel were forced to return to Germany, where they began documenting the post-war era. A few years later, however, they returned to their farm in Santa Rosa, where they lived out their final days. Hagel died in 1973 and Mieth in 1998.
