Noted Photographer Hansel Mieth Dies Her Picture Of A Rhesus Monkey On Life Magazine Cover In 1939 Left An Impression

Hansel Mieth Hagel, a photographer who docu mented the Great Depres sion and World War II for Time, Fortune and Life magazines, died Feb. 14 at a friend’s home in Santa Rosa, Calif. She was 88 and lived on a ranch nearby.

She was known professionally as Hansel Mieth, and she left a lasting impression in 1939 with a picture of a rhesus monkey rising from the waters of the Caribbean as it fled an animal research center. It appeared on the cover of Life and remains one of the magazine’s most often requested images.

With her husband, Otto Hagel, she recorded the plight of migrant farmhands in California’s Central Valley, the 1934 cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley and the violent general strike in San Francisco that year.

In the 1940s she photographed soldiers returning from battle and Japanese-Americans interned at Heart Mountain, Wyo.

In 1948, Life sent the Hagels back to their native Fellbach, Germany, for a feature on the war’s aftermath among the ruins.

In the 1950s, the couple refused to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee and were blacklisted.

As a result, their freelance assignments dried up and they turned to raising cattle and chickens. Their last photo essay, “The Simple Life,” about their work on their California ranch, appeared in Life in 1955.

Mieth’s photographs are in the collection of the Library of Congress and others around the country.

She and her husband were honored at the Eighth International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France, in 1996.

A retrospective of their work is planned next year at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Otto Hagel died in 1973. No immediate relatives survive.