Meaning, memory and misogyny: LIFE photographer Hansel Mieth's monkey portrait

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2005 by Dolores Flamiano

Mieth's observation also raises an important point about LIFE photographers, at least in the magazine's early years. Although the writers and editors publicly praised the photographers, they privately disparaged them. "Editors, writers, and reporters," Wainwright noted, "often looked down on photographers, thinking of them as marginally talented, babyish, unreliable, opportunistic, self-important, boring and even stupid." (53) This view is reflected in editorial practices at the magazine, where photographers had little control over the selection and treatment of their work. According to Wainwright.

    Most picture stories at LIFE, it is fair to say, were discovered or
    somehow dreamed up by non-photographers. And once the photographer
    had made his or her absolutely crucial (and often deeply personal)
    contributions to the job, the editors took over. Generally speaking,
    photographers did not select the pictures that were used in the
    stories (they usually played little or no part even in deciding
    which pictures the editors would see), and they had little or no
    say about the emphasis pictures were given or the space their
    stories got in the magazine. Likewise photographers were not
    consulted about the writing or the headlines in the stories, even
    those stories that had originated with them. (54)

This lack of control was a source of great frustration for Mieth, as well as other photographers, including Robert Capa and most famously W. Eugene Smith. Capa said that picture editor Wilson Hicks "was trying to hold him down with trivial assignments, was killing too many of his stories, and was constantly trying to cheat him." (55) Mieth complained bitterly when she felt that the editors used her photographs to communicate racist messages. After the publication of a 1940 photographic essay about birth control in South Carolina, she wrote about LIFE's selection of photographs and treatment of the story: "They are cutting the heart out of everything I do. I am sick of it. I am sick of the whole damned job.... They can shove their rotten magazine." (56)

Mieth and Billings were from different worlds--socially, politically and in terms of their positions and power at LIFE magazine--but they did have one thing in common: they were miserable at LIFE. Despite the fact that they loved their work, "happiness still would prove to be elusive under Luce" because they had both "stepped into a crucible that churned up people as magazine fodder for the Luce press." (57) Mieth was not only churned up, but forced to the margins, and ultimately out of commercial photojournalism.

At the height of her promising career in photojournalism, Mieth was blacklisted for her refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She experienced growing marginalization at LIFE after leaving New York and returning to California, where she and Hagel bought a farm in Santa Rosa. Mieth and Hagel published two collaborative LIFE stories during the postwar period: "Return to Fellbach" (1950) and "The Simple Life" (1955). These stories were significant because of their autobiographical nature and their bitter irony. For the Fellbach assignment, Mieth and Hagel returned to the German town they had fled more than two decades earlier because of Nazi repression. Ironically, upon their return to the U.S., their freedom to travel was restricted because they were suspected communists. For "The Simple Life," they documented their struggle to eke out a living as independent farmers. Here the irony was in the title; life was anything but simple, especially considering the fact (undisclosed in the LIFE story) that Mieth suspected the government of contaminating her livestock in an effort to "harrass unrepentant leftists." (58)