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

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2005 by Dolores Flamiano

4. Bezner, p. 2.

5. Cultural historians have analyzed LIFE's influential articulations of national identity, the American Dream and modernity. Wendy Kozol, LIFE's America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994): James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Terry Smith. Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For critical essays on the range of topics covered by LIFE, from gender to race to the atomic bomb, see Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). For an analysis of the larger journalistic context in which LIFE emerged, with a focus on the magazine's publisher, see James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987).

6. Doss, p. 2.

7. Ken Light, Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000); John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1998).

8. Sally Stein, "Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel," in Amy Rule and Nancy Solomon, eds., Original Sources: Art and Archives at the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, 2002), p. 127.

9. Andre Codrescu and Terence Pitts, Reframing America: Alexander Alland, Otto Hagel & Hansel Mieth, John Gutmann, Lisette Model, Marion Palfi, Robert Frank (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1995), p. 17.

10. Ken Light, Witness in Our Time; Susan Ehrens, "Hansel Mieth," Photo Metro, Volume 5, no. 49 (May 1987), pp. 5-12; Grace Schaub, "Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel: A Story of Love, Commitment and Search for Truth," Photographer's Forum, November 1994, pp. 26-37; Grace Schaub, "Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel: Never Just Art," in View Camera, January/February 1996, pp. 20-27. For information about Nancy Schiesari's documentary Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer, see the PBS website: www.pbs.org/independentlens/hanselmieth/film.html.> 11. Brown, p. 113.

12. Mieth and Hagel were strong and lifelong supporters of Bridges and his International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. Hagel created "Men and Machines," a photo essay and later a book documenting the mechanization of the California waterfront. Hagel also assisted author Charles R. Larrowe in his Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1972). The ILWU was among the left-wing unions expelled by the CIO in 1950. See Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994) and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998).

13. John Loengard, "Peter Stackpole" (interview), LIFE Photographers, p. 59.

14. Sally Stein, "On Location: The Placement (and Replacement) of California in 1930s Photography," in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University of California Press, 2000), p. 183. As Stein noted, the San Francisco street scene photographs were part of a larger series Mieth called "The Great Hunger," which included images of Sacramento Hoovervilles and migrant farm workers. Also see Susan Ehrens, "Hansel Mieth," Photo Metro Volume 5, no, 49 (May 1987), pp. 5-12.