MEANING, MEMORY AND MISOGYNY: LIFE PHOTOGRAPHER HANSEL MIETH'S MONKEY PORTRAIT

IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH 1

"A misogynist monkey seeks solitude in the Caribbean off Puerto Rico" (1939) by Hansel Mieth; Time Life Pictures

German migr photographer Hansel Mieth (1909-98) vividly

documented pivotal cultural events of twentieth-century America. As an amateur photographer during the Great Depression, she recorded her life working alongside itinerant farm workers and radical labor activists in California. With the Works Progress Administration (WPA), she photographed immigrant communities in San Francisco, California. As a staff photographer for LIFE magazine, she traveled the nation creating memorable photographic essays on a diverse range of subjects, including cowboys, unwed mothers, women in the garment workers union and the Dionne quintuplets. Mieth also shot portraits of famous people such as Albert Einstein and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But perhaps her most enduring photographic legacy consists of images of ordinary people who symbolize important social transformations. These photographs include her own versions of two iconic topics of World War II images: "Rosie the Riveter" and Japanese internment camps.

In 1941 Popular Photography magazine described Mieth as "one of America's top-notch woman photographers."1 At the height of her career from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, her work straddled two distinct and often contradictory worlds: socially conscious photography and commercial photojournalism. By the 1950s, as art historian LiIi Corbus Bezner has noted, the boundaries between these categories had blurred. Documentary photography "increasingly became categorized as professional photojournalism as its ideological presumptions and hegemonic hold were questioned."2 The aesthetics and the emotional engagement of documentary photography were absorbed into commercial photojournalism, where they were often used to communicate conservative ideologies.

Mieth's career at LIFE coincided with this transitional period in American photography. A close reading of Mieth's published photographs-along with unpublished sources such as personal manuscripts and interviews-demonstrates the process by which LIFE appropriated leftist social reform photography. The term "cultural appropriation" is defined as "the taking-from a culture that is not one's own-of intellectual property, cultural expression or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge."3 Mieth's politics and artistic philosophy were rooted in a working-class, immigrant background. She identified with the poor and she strongly supported labor unions and racial and gender equality. LIFE's staff in general consisted of white, upper-class American-born males who embraced probusiness, anti-labor, misogynistic and racist ideologies. In the process of appropriating Mieth's photographs, LIFE often had to alter their meaning to suit the magazine's hegemonic worldview. This was accomplished through a variety of means, including the careful selection, arrangement, editing and rewriting of photographs and the narratives that framed them.

By the late 1940s, Mieth's position as a social reform photographer within the world of commercial photojournalism had become untenable. She found herself increasingly marginalized at LIFE, finally quitting photojournalism and moving from New York City to California. As Bezner states, "This parallel between the decline of documentary photography and the rise of political repression is no mere coincidence-a redbaiting, blacklisting climate forced many artists to retreat into safer, more private realms."4 Mieth has faded into obscurity, while her contemporaries such as Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith are widely celebrated. As a victim of Gold War blacklisting, Mieth lost more than photographic assignments-she also lost a place in public memory.

During her career at LIFE, Mieth produced hundreds of photographs and dozens of photographic essays. This article focuses on her most famous single photograph: a portrait of a monkey, '!'his image has taken on a life of its own, beyond the intentions of the photographer or the editors of LIFE. It also sheds light on editorial practices at LIFE and exemplifies key aspects of Mieth's career at the magazine.

LIFE sent Mieth to Puerto Rico in 1939 to photograph a rhesus monkey colony established by Harvard University and other institutions for research, including studies of childhood diseases. This assignment produced the image generally acknowledged as Mieth's most famous single photograph: a portrait of a glowering rhesus monkey. This image is a photographic icon that continues to resonate with viewers. The photograph began as part of a significant science story, but its meaning was dramatically altered and ultimately trivialized by LIFE editors. They removed it from its original context and turned it into a novelty photograph called The Misogynist. Similarly, Mieth's status as a serious feature photographer shifted during and after World War II when her assignments became increasingly trivial and then disappeared altogether. Ultimately, her career at LIFE was a casualty of the Cold War.

Historians of art, popular culture and photography have explored LIFE as a rich resource for understanding twentieth-century American culture and society. The magazine provides a fascinating and diverse visual record of the news, entertainment and social trends of the five decades (193672) during which it was published as a weekly. Equally important, it also reveals the politics of Henry Luce and his Time-Life media empire and the century's shifting ideologies of race, gender, class and national identity.5 By 1939, when Mieth's monkey portrait was published, LIFE had a circulation of two million, making it one of the most widely consumed magazines in America.6

A handful of authors have explored Mieth's career at LIFE and her contributions to photography. Photojournalism professor Ken Light of University of California, Berkeley focused on Mieth as a documentary photographer, while former LIFE photographer John Loengard discussed her within the context of LIFE photojournalists.7 Light focused on her Depression-era photographs and early work for LIFE, viewing Mieth as a precursor to later social documentarians such as Mary Ellen Mark and Susan Mcisclas. Loengard profiled Mieth as a pioneering member of LIFE's early photographic staff, emphasizing her better-known but less socially conscious work, including a cover photograph of the Dionnc quintuplets. Both Light and Loengard alluded to the contradictions that marked her career at the magazine.

Art historian Sally Stein of University of California, Irvine delved more deeply into Mieth's complex relationship with LIFE. In an interpretative essay in Original Sources: Art and Archives al the Center for Creative Photography (2002), Stein wrote about the famous monkey portrait: "The strange success of that photograph is especially ironic since Mieth and [husband Otto] Hagel led lives that demonstrated a fervent commitment to social and political independence rather than commercial and cultural success."8 It is worth noting that the monkey photograph did not bring Mieth much financial success, as it was (and is) owned by Time-Life.

Art historian Terence Pitts offered another perspective on Mieth in Refraining America (1995), a book that focused on the work of migr photographers. He noted that Mieth's outsider status gave her a unique perspective on life in the United States. This perspective, in turn, made her valuable to LIFE editors and provided depth and complexity to her photographs: "Partly because [European migr photographers] looked at America with fresh eyes and partly because the America they found did not correspond to the America they expected, their work often addressed the issues that haunt this country: poverty, injustice, and intolerance."9 Socially conscious photographers Susan Ehrens and Grace Schaub and filmmaker Nancy Schiesari have also written about Mieth.10 They take a sympathetic view of Mieth's political and artistic goals, seeing her association with LIFE as a mixed blessing at best. The magazine gained her widespread exposure, but ultimately acted as a constraining force in her life and work.

The existing literature on Mieth suggests that her career at LIFE was fraught with frustrations and contradictions. She deplored the magazine's anti-labor bias and the influence its corporate advertisers exerted on the editorial content. At the same time, she identified with the working class and minority people whom she photographed. Moreover, she supported racial equality at a time when racism was the norm, both at LIFE and in American society. Scholars have not yet fully explored how Mieth responded to these tensions, how they shaped her photojournalism and how LIFE changed the meaning of her photographs to suit its own purposes. Nor have they placed the demise of Mieth's career in the larger context of Cold War redbaiting and blacklisting.

Hansel (born Johanna) Mieth was born in Germany in 1909, where she grew up in poverty. Although she dreamed of becoming a doctor, financial problems forced her to leave school early, and she never received a formal education. At the age of 15 she left Germany with Otto Hagel, who became her lifelong companion, fellow photographer and husband. After traveling around Europe, Mieth and Hagel moved to California, where they worked as fruit pickers along the Pacific coast. Their lifelong identification with the working class was forged during these years. Their earliest pictures showed life among itinerant farm workers. Her first photographic assignments were for the WPA. Her ability to connect with marginalized communities (minorities and radical workers) opened the door to her LIFE career. She helped Peter Stackpole, newly hired as LIFE'S West Coast photographer, to get photos for a Chinatown assignment:

Stackpole came in [to the San Francisco studio where they both developed their prints] with a tale of woe. His Chinatown story was not working out right. The Chamber of Commerce had taken him in tow, and all he could get was very nice pictures of the telephone exchange, the theaters, and all the obvious things. He wanted to show the Chinese in their homes, about their daily tasks, but they didn't want to be photographed. They were polite-very polite, thank you. But no pictures! When he insisted, they smiled and didn't understand.

Hansel agreed to take him to the homes of her Chinese friends. They knew and trusted her, and with her help he got his pictures. She gave him a few of her own Chinatown shots, and he showed them to Dave Hulburd, now head of Time magazine. Time bought her pictures and wanted to see more. Soon Hulburd was giving Hansel assignments. First there were small stories. Then came a big one on Harry Bridges and the San Francisco waterfront.11

Mieth and Hagel befriended and photographed Harry Bridges, a key figure in California's radical labor movement.12 Her apparent acceptance by minorities and radical labor leaders combined with her "New Deal" photographic aestheticwith its strong composition, dramatic lighting and humanistic feel-made her attractive to LIFE. Some staff members, however, were suspicious of her political connections. Stackpole, for instance, recalled that LIFE'S managing editor, John Shaw Billings, "asked me a lot of questions about Hansel Mieth. He said 'I guess she's pretty left-wing, isn't she?' I said, 'I suppose so. She photographed the waterfront strike in San Francisco and the downtrodden.' He said, 'I don't care as long as she takes good pictures."'13

For her part, Mieth was reluctant to work for what she called a "capitalistic" enterprise and disliked the magazine's anti-labor editorial philosophy and its pandering relationship to advertisers. She worried that she did not fit in at LIFE. Her concerns were well founded because from her first encounter with LIFE, Mieth's photographs were used in ways that defeated their original intent. For example, Stein recounted the publication of an early Mieth photograph in LIFE:

Less than two months after its debut as a popular weekly, LIFE's January 11, 1937, issue carried on one page seven shots of San Francisco street life at its seediest. Below the headline "BUM" unfolds a short sequence in which a man lies on the sidewalk ignored by passersby, then attracts a small crowd, and finally is moved to the stoop of a flophouse bearing the name "Comfort," which permits the resumption of pedestrian traffic....

We should not be surprised that LIFE framed the series in 1937 to emphasize the ubiquitous "urban instinct" to avoid getting involved.... More surprising is that Mieth appears to have accepted such treatment of her pictures; shortly afterward she moved to New York when LIFE offered her a job on staff.14

When asked by interviewer Loengard (himself a former LIFE photographer) how she and Hagel ended up working for Henry Luce, Mieth replied "I must have been a little hungry or something, because I said okay and joined the staff of LffiE."15

IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH 2

"Rhesus monkey climbing on a man's chest at a monkey colony" (1939) by Hansel Mieth; Time Life Pictures

Despite the poor ideological fit between Mieth and her LIFE colleagues and editors, her career at the magazine soon took off. She received a wide range of assignments, many of which were prominently featured as the photographic essay of the week, and three of which earned the coveted status of cover story.16 Mieth's major photographic works told compelling stories about dominant values in American society and about vital issues of the day. Mieth's published LIFE work reveals, to some extent, her social perspective and her approach to photography. This material does not, however, tell the whole story. Because the stories were laid out and captioncd by editors-not photographers-they generally do not reveal the circumstances behind the photos or give the photographer's viewpoint. Mieth's interviews, correspondence files and unpublished autobiographical manuscript offer insights into her working conditions at the magazine, the extent to which she exercised creative control over her assignments, her photographic techniques, her interactions with the people in her photos and her response to the published stories.

Mieth covered a variety of stories-from the serious to the frivolous-but some common themes emerged. A few themes were actively promoted by LIFE: science, children, animals and women. LIFE, however, downplayed Mieth's politics in its promotional material and portrayed her as a benign photographer with no particular political views. Note, for instance, the tone and content of a brief biography of Mieth that ran in 1937 (in the issue with her cover story on spring lambs): "Noted for her photographs of children, she also takes excellent animal pictures...."17 Similarly, a 1938 feature stated that "the pictures she most enjoys taking are of young people and babies."18 Both blurbs carefully ignored the kind of photos that actually got LIFE interested in Mieth: her powerful images of labor strife, migrant farm workers and minority communities in California. The Puerto Rico monkey colony assignment certainly contributed to Mieth's reputation as a photographer of animals. More importantly it illustrates her empathy with her subjects and the potential power of primate images. The trajectory of this photograph parallels Mieth's own: they were both appropriated, domesticated and subjected to a narrative constructed by LIFE to further its own ideological purposes.

MONKEY AS ICON: A SEXUALIZED DISCOURSE

The photograph of the rhesus monkey began as part of a scientific series about a monkey colony in Gayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Mieth had built a reputation as a skilled and sympathetic photographer of animals and children and was regularly assigned to cover scientific and medical stories.19 Although the monkey story started out as a typical LIFE assignment, it would soon be transformed into something more than a science feature. It was seen first as part of a science story, then as a humorous "Picture of the Week," then as an inside joke among the LIFE staff and finally as a classic photograph.

"First American Monkey Colony Starts on Puerto Rico Islet" appeared on January 2, 1939. It was a two-page story with six photographs, including a life-size image of a rhesus monkey, three photos of scientists working with monkeys and two photos of monkeys from India exploring their new environment. The text offered a curious blend of scientific background and moralistic anthropomorphism. For instance, the article explains that the main reason for the establishment of the 300-monkey colony was "to breed thousands of healthy animals of known ancestry at low cost for medical experiments-particularly infantile paralysis." Shifting to a discussion of the monkey's characteristics, the article commented,

Because he is considered sacred in India, the rhesus is domineering, undisciplined and bad tempered. Sexually promiscuous, he contrasts sharply with the monogamous, well-behaved gibbon. Besides studying their respective family behaviors, Dr. [Clarence Ray] Carpenter and visiting scientists will conduct psychological tests and experiment on causes and cures for tuberculosis, infantile paralysis and leprosy. Progress of this work will be reported by LIFE in a future issue.20

It is worth noting that the article omitted any reference to the main focus of Carpenter's research: sexuality and dominance in primate social groups. The term "family behaviors" was a euphemism for sexual behaviors, but the article did not delve into any of the particulars, such as Carpenter's castration of selected males in the group.

The field of primatology was in its infancy in the late 1930s, and Carpenter was one of its founding fathers; he had built a reputation on his studies of howler monkeys in Panama and gibbons in Thailand.21 The establishment of the rhesus monkey colony in Cayo Santiago further solidified Carpenter's status as a pioneering observer of free-ranging monkeys and apes.22 The colony was the first long-term research field site for semicaptive primate populations, and it still exists as such today.23 According to a researcher who visited the colony in the 1960s and '70s, it attracted wide publicity during its early years and received visiting journalists (including Mieth) "until the risk of being attacked by the animals became a deterring factor."24

Although this first installment seemed to have the makings of an exciting photo essay-scientific significance, exotic locale, photogenic animals and prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Columbia-the promised continuation of the rhesus monkey story never materialized. Instead, two weeks later (January 16, 1939) the magazine published a portrait of a single monkey as the "Picture of the Week." This fullpage photo, with the caption, "A misogynist monkey seeks solitude in the Caribbean off Puerto Rico," became Mieth's best-known picture.25 According to the short explanatory essay accompanying the photo, "the chatter of innumerable female monkeys had impelled this neurotic bachelor to seek escape from the din of Santiago." The photo's popularity must have derived, at least in part, from its underlying narrative. The editors cast the monkey as the victim of female noise and (implicitly) sexual aggression. In contrast to this sexist narrative, the essay challenged gender role stereotypes by casting Mieth as the intrepid photographer "who promptly plunged into the lagoon, camera strapped to her shoulder, swam and waded until she overtook the exhausted misogynist. After taking the photo shown here she helped a native boy drive the monkey back to his island home."26

To analyze the image's visual content and symbolic meaning, it is worth noting that the photograph belongs to a widely recognized category of images: the portrait. As such, it presents an image of an "individualized" and "coherent subject."27 This monkey, although nameless, appears to be distinctly individualistic and intelligent. Moreover, the animal's steady and active gaze at the photographer (and thus, the viewer) sets the photograph apart from many animal portraits. Feminist scholar Donna Haraway's description of the symbolic power of the primate gaze in museum exhibits helps to explain the appeal of Mieth's portrait: "[the primate] catches the viewer's gaze and holds it in communion. The animal is vigilant, ready to sound the alarm at the intrusion of man, but ready also to hold forever the gaze of meeting, the moment of truth, the original encounter."28

The photograph was published a mere 14 years after the well-publicized Scopes Trial that upheld the teaching of evolution in public schools. Thus, the theory that humans descended from apes was relatively new. This made the issue of identification-which clearly plays a role in the image's resonance and popularity-all the more acute. As Haraway notes, "monkeys and apes mirror humans in a complex play of distortions."29 In this context, it is interesting to note that the photograph itself contains a mirror image of the monkey, reflected on the surface of the Caribbean Sea. In gazing at the monkey, we are identifying with an "attractive, interesting and only slightly exotic" other self.30

In letters to the editor, readers responded enthusiastically to the empathy that characterized the "misogynist," noting that Mieth's photo both captured emotions in the monkey and evoked emotions in the viewer. One reader described "the horrible foreboding of doom" the photo inspired. Another reader simply stated that it "scared the hell out of me." Still another focused on the monkey himself, projecting human emotions on the animal: "It is the portrait of a misfit suffering the untold agonies of a tortured mind. Frustration yet determination, terror yet superiority are all there.... All the world has turned against him and he is fired with a hatred of everything he knows. And it is a magnificent, futile, unavailing hatred."31

More than a year after it was first published, readers continued to remember and write about the monkey photograph. In two letters to the editor published in August 1940, readers noted a striking resemblance between the "disgruntled monkey" and a "surly German prisoner of war" whose photograph was published by LIFE.32 In the 1970s and '80s, the photograph resurfaced in retrospective books, where it was prominently displayed and its sexist narrative was told to a new audience. In 1973, the monkey was featured in The Best, of LIFE under the heading "Fun Out of Life," with the caption "An unhappy rhesus monkey ... glowers from a sandbar after escaping chattering females."33 In LIFE: The First 50 Years: 1936-1986, Mieth's monkey was featured as a "Classic Photo" from 1939, with the caption "A misogynist monkey fleeing jungle females opted for the sea."34

The image also circulated beyond the pages of LIFE and its commemorative books. It was chosen by Edward Steichen to be included in the book and exhibition "Memorable LIFE Photographs" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951.35 It was reprinted by former LIFE editor Edward K. Thompson in his autobiography, along with the story behind it.36 And the photograph was featured in a 1980 Science article about the Cayo Santiago primate colony, where it was incorrectly identified as a LIFE cover photograph. Interestingly, the caption in Science states that the monkey had been "driven into the sea by his photographer."37

With the 2003 broadcast of the documentary Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer on PBS, the monkey photograph reached a new generation of viewers. It continues to resonate, and its meaning has shifted yet again. In an interview for the documentary, Mieth focused on the desperation of the animals and recalls a recurring dream featuring the monkey: "I was sitting on that outcropping and I turned to look and next to me was that monkey and he looked angry. Then it was as if the monkey communicated with me and said 'How long are we going to sit here like this?' I said, 'I don't know. Till things get better.'"38 The lesson of this dream, according to Mieth, is that anger is not the answer. Several viewers who posted comments on the PBS web site commented on the monkey and wanted to know where they could buy a copy of the photograph. One viewer wrote "I wept with the story of how Hansel took that photo and how she was haunted throughout her life by that encounter with that animal and the image she captured. It was a revelation to hear that that moment had stuck with her throughout her life and that she had had a dialogue in a dream later in her life with that lonely, pensive, angry animal." Another wrote: "Please send me a picture of the 'Monkey' because his expression brought out tears from my eyes which doesn't happen easily to me. I also sec the profundity of truth in the eyes of that (human) animal. It is like looking truth in the face for me."39

IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH 3

"A view of a monkey getting medical attention at a monkey colony" (1939) by Hansel Mieth; Time Life Pictures

The evolution of the "misogynist monkey" photograph-and its strong resonance with editors, readers and with the photographer herself-raises several issues that are rooted in the photograph but extend beyond it into larger cultural arenas, including cultural constructions of sexuality and race in primatology and the immense popularity of apes and monkeys not only as scientific subjects but also as icons of popular culture (a trend that accelerated after World War II).

Haraway has observed that primatology is marked by orientalist discourse, borrowing from literary theorist Edward Said. Said argued that Western scholars tend to understand the Orient in terms of its otherness and marginality. This idea also helps to explain how scientists understand primates. According to Haraway,

Simian orientalism means that western primatology has been about the construction of the self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal ... Traditionally associated with lewd meanings, sexual lust, and the unrestrained body, monkey and apes mirror humans in a complex play of distortions over centuries of western commentary on these troubling doubles. Primatology is western discourse, and it is sexualized discourse.40

It takes little imagination to read the narratives surrounding Mieth's monkey portrait as a highly sexualized discourse complete with "lewd meanings, sexual lust, and the unrestrained body." And the impassioned and highly personal responses of readers to the monkey's image suggest that many of them used the raw material of the monkey to construct ideas about themselves and others, including a despised other (the German soldier to whom the monkey was compared). The editors of LIFE (all male) and many viewers seemed to read the "misogynist monkey" as a mirror for their own misogyny. This conclusion is supported by the textual background of the photograph, whereby the monkey is set upon by "innumerable chattering females" who are also sexually aggressive. Such a reading could be analyzed as a male response to changing sex roles in American society, specifically to the perceived threat of female freedom (economic, social and sexual) and female vociferousness. In good hegemonic fashion, the editor's explanation of the monkey's unhappy state works to normalize gender ideology and misogyny. Upon closer examination, however, the narrative that LIFE imposed on the monkey seems far-fetched at best. The monkey's angry and forlorn expression is more likely the result of his treatment by humans. He had recently been captured in his native India and subjected to a long and brutal journey across the ocean to Puerto Rico, where he was destined to live out his days in captivity, subjected to castration and other experimentation. Instead of framing the monkey as an unwilling participant in Western science, the editors constructed a narrative in which he became a potent symbol of patriarchy and misogyny.

MONKEY AS WINDOW: LIFE'S EDITORIAL PRACTICES AND PREJUDICES

Mieth's monkey photograph provides a fascinating glimpse into the editorial process during the early years of LIFE, as well as the personalities of key players in the organization and the place of photographers in the LIFE hierarchy. The recollections of Mieth and others reveal that editorial decisions were not always motivated by traditional journalistic values such as newsworthiness. Rather, LIFE often valued sensationalism and visual humor above other considerations. Although he was the subject of serious research into childhood diseases, the monkey was transformed into a sexist joke. The notion of a lone monkey ileeing "the chatter of innumerable females" seemed to resonate widely with LIFE's staff and readers. Thompson credits managing editor John Shaw Billings with recognizing and exploiting the visual value of the monkey picture:

One Mieth project caused me to disagree with Billings's picture judgment. She had shot what we expected to be an essay at a Puerto Rican medical lab which used rhesus monkeys. It was well researched and full of eloquent pictures. Billings riffled through and came upon a lone male standing chest deep in water, looking forlorn but glowering. Apparently he had fled from amorous females. Billings, who usually disdained anthropomorphism, immediately labeled it "The Misogynist" and laid it out for "Picture of the Week," setting the rest of the photos aside. I protested feebly about all those other excellent pictures going to waste, and he brushed me off with, "Oh, those can run anytime." They never did, but Billings was right. The monkey was a classic and showed up on the walls of male hangouts like filling stations, machine shops, and bars all over America.41

Billings, South Carolina-born and Harvard-educated, was known for his editorial talent and his strongly held prejudices. Thompson praised his "consummate editing abilities" and former editor Loudon Wainwright lauded his "extraordinary gifts as the editor."42 Wainwright echoed other IJFE insiders when he observed Billings' fondness for Shirley Temple and trains and his aversion to Indians:

He certainly wasn't a man of elegant tastes or loftly editorial purposes. His favorite actress was Shirley Temple, the dimpled and curly-haired child star, and he was so interested in railroads and everything about them that his obsession became something of a staff joke, as was his antipathy toward American Indians-or more correctly toward pictures of Indians, which he felt were usually so faked and old-hat that they should never appear in LIFE.43

His prejudices extended well beyond Indians. As noted by author Michael F. Lane, a sympathetic observer, "Billings was democratic in his prejudice against people who weren't like him.'"44 His diaries are replete with examples of his racist views. For instance, on a boat trip to Puerto Rico, Billings complained about the locals, calling them "greasy ugly people whom I see I am not going to like."45 He expressed similar views on other minorities. As Lane noted, "Billings did not have a Southern drawl, but his Southern sentiments ran deep. In his Time-Life office above his desk were two pictures, one the Confederate flag, the other a sketch of the cross section of a ship with detailed instructions on how to completely pack a slave ship for maximum profit."46

Billings took many pictures of the African Americans who worked on his ancestral home in South Carolina (formerly a slave plantation). A portrait of Patience, one of his black maids, appears in a personal photo album, with a caption written by Billings: "It sho' look like a monkey, but it look like me, too."47 This caption and the thinking behind it shed light on Billings' selection of the monkey photograph. This example clearly illustrates the construction of people of color as "primitives, more closely connected to the apes than the white race."48 It is worth noting that Billings' sentiments were widely shared and the captions that appeared in LIFE under the images of people of color were often openly racist throughout the 193Os and '4Os. Mieth, however, was committed to racial equality and complained bitterly about the racism she observed in the pages of the magazine and in the editorial offices."49

In addition to the misogynist and racist jokes, an inside joke among LIFE staffers was that the monkey bore an uncanny resemblance to Luce. According to Susan Ehrens, a photo historian who interviewed Mieth, the evolution of the rhesus monkey story was bitterly ironic for Mieth. It resulted in her most famous photo, but utterly sacrificed the assignment's scientific significance:

When she returned to New York with her extensive study of the primates, she was horrified by the misuse of the photographs by her editors at LIFE. It seemed that Alex King, one of the writers on the staff, decided that when angry, the publisher Henry Luce resembled the monkey in Hansel's most famous photograph.... It also appeared in U.S. Camera, titled "Mad Monkey." It has since been reprinted by LIFE numerous times, most recently in the 50-year anniversary issue and Hansel notes, "It's one of their prized possessions."50 When Loengard asked Mieth if she thought the monkey looks like Luce, she replied "I didn't see Luce that much. He had lots of other things to do rather than talk with photographers. The photographers were a low group of animals then."51 This is an interesting word choice, given that by comparing Luce to the monkey, the LIFE staff turned the tables on their boss, calling attention to his well-known lack of humanity. Indeed, Luce was despised by several close associates, a fact that may have contributed to the popularity of the inside joke. Billings, for instance, frequently complained about Luce. A typical diary entry stated, "I hate Luce's guts for being a hard cold selfish devil."52

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

The evolution of the narrative behind Mieth's monkey photo-and the image's enduring popularity-illustrates the power of photography as a mirror for reflecting and projecting ideologies and emotions. The photograph's transformation from a scientific document to a novelty shot can also be seen as a metaphor for Mieth's own appropriation and marginalization as a serious photographer. Mieth's political convictions, sensitivity and empathy shaped her LIFE stories, but her voice was sometimes muted, silenced or drastically altered by the editors' selection and captioning of her photographs.

As filmmaker Nancy Schiesari observed, "Hansel affected her subject to trust her by her receptivity and sense of presence as an empathetic witness to their reality.... Her perspective came from observing people and their relationships to each other."59 For Mieth and Hagel this emotional connection was tied to the larger purpose of using photography to bring about social change. Hagel summed up their struggle in a manuscript that Mieth often cited in her later years as an articulation of their life and work. "We thought that our pictures were a subtle means of bringing about a change in human affairs, and we were doing this through the rich man's publication. We were using their weapons and turning them against them. So we felt, so we thought, so we sincerely believed."60

In practice, this goal proved a source of great frustration, as shown by Mieth's experiences with the monkey story, which brought her fame but also trivialized her accomplishments. According to Stein, Mieth and Hagel "lived with contradictions and suffered from them, but their determination to face such contradictions made their lives and the documents they produced immensely compelling."61 LIFE had its own response to these contradictions-the appropriation of Mieth's leftist, socially conscious reform photography to sell the magazine's view of hegemonic power relations. This appropriation can be seen clearly in the case of a monkey whose photograph was decontextualized, trivialized and renarrativized. The photograph was stripped of both its scientific and emotional value, and was used instead to advance LIFE's misogynistic worldview in which males were compelled to flee from noisy females. The image also shows the photographer's lack of power within an institution-the photojournalistic magazine-that was ostensibly photography-centered.62

SIDEBAR

The aesthetics and the emotional engagement of documentary photography were absorbed into commercial photojournalism, where they were often used to communicate conservative ideologies.

SIDEBAR

Mieth was reluctant to work for what she called a "capitalistic" enterprise and disliked the magazine's anti-labor editorial philosophy and its pandering relationship to advertisers.

SIDEBAR

The evolution of the "misogynist monkey" photograph-and its strong resonance with editors, readers and with the photographer herself-raises several issues that are rooted in the photograph but extend beyond it into larger cultural arenas.

SIDEBAR

The evolution of the narrative behind Mieth's monkey photo-and the image's enduring popularity-illustrates the power of photography as a mirror for reflecting and projecting ideologies and emotions.

FOOTNOTE

NOTES

1. Robert W. Brown, "Hansel Mieth Gets Them to Pose, " Popular Photography, April 1941, p. 22.

2. Lih Corbus Berner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal to the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 2.

3. Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao, Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 1.

4. Bezner, p. 2.

5. Cultural historians liaoe 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 UfE,, 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 largerjournalistic context in which IJFE 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 Ijoengard, LTFE 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 lme, Commitment and Search for Truth, " Photographer's Forum, November 1994,pp. 26-37; Grace Schaub, "Hansel Mielh and Olto 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/independentlzns/hanselniwth/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 lefl-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 llene 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 migrantfarm workers. Also see Susan Ehrens, "Hansel Mieth, " Photo Metro Volume 5, no. 49 (May 1987), pp. 5-12.

15. John Loengard, "Hansel Mieth" (interview), LIFE Photographers, p. 78.

16. Mieth's LIFE cover stories were "Spring Lambs, " May 25, 1937; "Garment Workers at Play [Women in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union], "August I, 1938; and "Dionne's Communion," September 2, 1940.

17. "Life's Pictures," LIFE, May 24, 1937, p. 82.

18. "Life's Pictures, " LIFE, March 28, 1938, p. 64.

19. These stories included "Animal Experimentation: Is It Essential to the Progress of Medicine?,"LIFE, October 24, 1938,pp. 46-53 "Barnyard Animals With Neuroses Hold Clue to Human Breakdowns," LIFE, October 30, 1939, pp. 80-85; "Cancer: Exploration of Its Nature and Cause Will be Organized in National Research Center, " LIFE, June 17, 1940,pp. 35-38; "The Heart: Its Diseases Are Now the Major Factor in the U.S. Death Rate, " LIFE, September 16, 1940, 37-40; "Deaf-Blind Children Learn to 'see and Hear' Through Sense of Touch, " LIFE, November 18, 1940, pp. 41-44.

20. "First American Monkey Colony Starts on Puerto Rico Islet, " LIFE, January 2,1939, p. 26.

21. Robert W. Sussman, "Piltdown Man: The Father of American Field Primalology," in Shirley C. Strum and Linda M. Fedigan, eds., Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 85-103; Donna Haraway, "A Semiotics of the Naturalistic Field: From C. R. Carpenter to S.A. Altmann, 1930-1955, " in Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 84-111.

22. The colony's establishment received more attention in scholarly publications than in the popular press, but it was reported in the New York Times Magazine. see George H. Copeland, "Wanted: More Monkeys, " New York Times Magazine, December 8, 1940, p. 25. For a report of Carpenter's research at the colony, see C.R. Carpenter, "Sexual Behavior of Free Ranging Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca Mulatto), "Journal of Comparative Psychology Volume 33, no. 1 (1942), pp. 113-162.

23. Today the Cayo Santiago colony is one of three facilities that constitute the Caribbean Primate Research Center (CPRC), a research, training and education unit of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Medical Sciences Campus. The CRPC is supported by a core grant from the National Institutes of Health, National Center for Research Resources, Comparative Medicine Program and the UPR. see Unit of Comparative Medicine Homepage (n.d.), http://ucm.rcm.upr.edu/cprc.html (September 22, 2004).

24. William K WMk, "The Cayo Santiago Primate Colony " Science 209 (September 26, 1980), pp. 1486-1491. This article included Mieth's' famous picture, but with a remarkably different explanation: "Adull male pigtail macaque driven into the sea by his photographer on Cayo Santiago. " It also inconectly states that the photograph "was first printed on Ae cover of LIFE magazine." Windle, "The Cayo Santiago Primate Colony," p. 1489.

25. "Picture of the Week,"LIFE, January 16, 1939, p. 17.

26. Ibid., p. 16.

27. Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 320.

28. Ibid., p. 30.

29. Ibid., p. 11.

30. Ibid., p. 320.

31. "Letters to the Editor, " LIFE, February 6, 1939, p. 2.

32. "letters to the Editor, LIFE, August 5, 1940, p. 2.

33. The Best of LIFE (New York: Time-Life Booh, 1973), p. 302.

34. LIFE: The First 50 Years: 1936-1986 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), p. 27.

35. Margaretta Mitchell, "Remembering Hansel Mieth: A Photqjournalist Who Championed the Downtrodden, " in ASMP Bulletin, April 1998, p. 15.

36. Edward K. Thompson, A Love Affair with LIFE & Smithsonian (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 60.

37. William F. Windle, "The Cayo Santiago Primate Colony, " Science (September 26, 1980), 1489.

38. Mieth, quoted in Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer.

39. Independent Lens: Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer, in Talkback, June 2, 2003. wwwpbs.org/independenuens/hanselmieth/talkback.html (September3, 2004).

40. Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 11.

41. Thompson, p. 59.

42. Ibid., p. 40. Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE (Mew York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986),p. 104.

43. Wamuinght, p. 105.

44. Michael F. Lane, "John Shaw Billings: The Demons That Drove Time/Life's 'Editor's Editor, '" Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, August 1997, p. 9.

45. John Shaw Billings diary, October 3, 1929, John Shaw Billings Collection, South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. Cited in lane, "John Shaw Billings, "p. 9.

46. lane, p. 9.

47. Ibid., p. 10.

48. Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 153.

49. For a discussion of Mieth's response to LIFE's racist treatment of black people in her photographic essay on birth control in South Carolina, as well as the institutional racism against Japanese Americans in the editorial offices during WWII, see Dolores Flamiano, "A Life of Their Own: Hansel Mieth's Photographic Essays, " in Media History Monographs, Volume 7, no. 1, 2004.

50. Susan Ehrens, "Hansel Mieth" Photo Metro Volume 5, no. 49 (May 1987), p. 8.

51. Mieth, quoted in Loengard, What They Saw, p. 87.

52. Billings, quoted in Lane, "John Shaw Billings,"p. 10.

53. Wainwright, The Great American Magazine, p. 149.

54. Ibid., p. 150.

55. Gretchen Garner, Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 79.

56. Mieth manuscript, pp. 104-105.

57. Lane, p. 8.

58. Stein, "Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, " in Rule and Solomon, eds., Original Sources, p. 129.

59. Nancy Schiesari, Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer, Filmmaker Q&A, (n.d.), www.pbs.org/independentkns/hanselmieth/qanda.html (September 3, 2004).

60. Otto Hagel, "Toward Clarification,"p. 144.

61. Stein, "HanselMieth and Otto Hagel,"p. 131.

62. I would like to thank the following people who generously helped in the research and writing of this paper: the staff of the Center for Creative Photography, Sally Stein, Ken Light and John Loengard. I would also like to thank the College of Arts and Letters at James Madison University for a summer research grant that allowed me to visit the Hansel Mieth/Otto Hagel Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

DOLORES FLAMIANO is an assistant professor in the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she teaches media literacy, visual communication and media analysis and criticism.