Background
Hansel Mieth was born on April 9, 1909, in Fillback, Germany.
Hansel Mieth was born on April 9, 1909, in Fillback, Germany.
Mieth worked for Time Inc., after moving to California in 1941, having been a staff photographer for Life magazine from 1937 to 1941. From 1934 to 1936 she was a WPA photographer in the West Coast project. She "had to go on any story Life sent me, from Southern mansions to Hell Hole swamp to Japanese relocation camps."
During the War Mieth photographed Japanese Americans who had been taken from their homes and interned by the Roosevelt government. In the early 1950s, the couple's refusal to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where they would have been required to name names of their friends in the labour movement, led to Mieth's losing her job at LIFE, and to their being unofficially blacklisted. Shunned by their former friends, the couple retired to their ranch in California where they raised livestock and where Mieth took up painting. She died in Santa Rosa, California, United States in 1998.
Hansel Mieth named as a major influences her mother and the artists Kàthe Kollwitz and Vincent van Gogh.
Hansel was married to Otto Hagel.