Hansel Mieth; Prolific Life Magazine Photographer

Hansel Mieth, 88, one of Life magazine’s prolific photographers in the 1930s and 1940s. The German-born Mieth and her photographer husband, Otto Hagel, were lured to Sonoma County by Jack London’s stories of America. In the 1930s, Mieth photographed migrant workers in the fields and labor camps of California and the bloody 1934 general strike in San Francisco, resulting in publication and eventually a job at Life. Her 1939 photograph of a monkey rising out of the Caribbean while trying to escape an animal research center in Puerto Rico remains one of the magazine’s most requested images. During World War II, Mieth photographed Japanese Americans held in relocation camps, and war widows and soldiers returning home from battle. The published photographs of Mieth and her husband, who died in 1973, dwindled in the 1950s after they refused to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mieth last June was named recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mother Jones International Documentary Fund. A major retrospective on the work of Mieth and Hagel is planned for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art next year. On Saturday in Santa Rosa, Calif., after a series of strokes.