[music] [typewriter] The year was 1938.

I was living in New York and working for Life magazine as a staff photographer.

Life was the top picture magazine in the country, and every week millions of people saw my pictures.

My husband, Otto, and I had a downtown apartment with a great view.

I had a steady paycheck and I was considered part of New York's elite.

I had it all, or so it seemed to my friends who were still struggling as freelance photographers.

But the reality of being a staff photographer for Life magazine wasn't always as glamorous as it appeared.

[jazzy music] One night, the magazine sent me to a stag party at the Waldorf Astoria.

I was supposed to take pictures of a nude girl coming out of a cake box, and that kind of junk.

So I rushed down the aisle and some old geezer was stretching out his legs to make me trip, and I fell over his legs.

And while I was lying there trying to get myself together, he was meat grabbing me all over.

And I got so angry, I took my 4x5 camera and hit him over the head.

[glass breaking] Carl: She called the managing editor of Life Edward Thompson, and said, "Edward, I've just killed a man."

And Ed Thompson said, "Killed a man, Hansel.

How could that be?

Why was that?"

And she said, "Because he continually pestered me, and there was nothing left for me to do."

Hansel: Well, it turned out I didn't kill him, but I probably gave him a pretty nasty headache.

And it certainly didn't stop Life magazine from sending me on more assignments.

Carl: In those early years, there were two women who were the leaders in the field of photojournalism.

One was Hansel Mieth, the other was Margaret Bourke-White.

All they cared about at Life was when they looked at a set of pictures that a photographer made.

Were they good pictures?

And why were they good pictures?

And did they tell stories?

And Hansel was among the best.

[camera click] Anne: Her gift as a photographer is to recognize when there is something happening that is of a universal enough nature that we as human beings would connect with it in a picture.

There is rarely the kind of suspicion in the faces of her subjects that you can see in the faces of other documentary photographs.

Clearly she had the capacity to make people trust her, to make them forget that she was there.

Hansel: If you want to be a photographer, you have to discipline yourself.

You have to learn to be a decent human being.

And you must have interest in your fellow man, and you must have some kind of feeling for each other.

My feeling towards people could be very strong, but also my hatred.

I had a very great hatred for a long, long time.

Toward those that I saw were exploiting or using their fellow man for their own good.

I was born in Oppersbong, Germany in 1909.

My given name was Joanna, and I was the oldest of three sisters.

We lived in a small village in a beautiful valley.

Times were hard.

The First World War ended in defeat for Germany.

My father, like the others, walked home from the battlefield and arrived in our village footsore, firm and infested, and deeply embittered.

A wave of hunger and disease swept our town.

My youngest sister Maria became very ill.

Because we were poor, Herr Doctor treated us with contempt.

He gave my sister a hurried looking over.

His diagnosis was wrong, and his treatment was worse.

Little Maria died.

[children laughing] All during my early school years, I had one madly persisting wish.

I wanted to be a doctor.

A doctor who loved and understood the poor.

But at age 13, I was one of 64 girls who became part of Herr Greffick's burden at the public school.

He said it was our misfortune to be born girls, and his misfortune to be compelled to teach us.

My marks were good, and I was eligible for a scholarship for higher education, but Herr graphic refused to forward my application.

He said, "It's a waste of money to give your kind of people an education.

You'll go to work in a factory like everybody else."

Otto: I met Hansel when we both were 13.

I had been recruited by the the earliest movements of the Hitler Youth.

Soon I saw they wanted to teach me how to use guns.

I said, "No, I will be my own kind of young German."

Hansel and I were alike that way.

When I tried to leave the Nazi movement, a group of boys attacked me and almost tore my ear off.

[children yelling] Hansel: Life in our small town was suffocating both of us.

so we hopped on trains like our hero Jack London, and hiked around Europe exploring other countries and talking to interesting people.

I dressed like a boy to go undetected, and Otto nicknamed me Hansel.

It was the beginning of our life on the road.

When we returned home, our school comrades accused us of being Vaterlandschlecht, meaning our thoughts were no longer pure and we couldn't be trusted.

Already in 1926, we were being watched.

They took us in repeatedly for questioning.

We decided we couldn't live in Germany anymore.

Otto: I got myself a job on a merchant liner to the US and jumped ship outside of Baltimore.

I had only 25 cents in my pocket.

Hansel: When Otto was beginning his life in America, I was still working in a sewing factory in Stuttgart.

After a 12-hour day, I returned home, falling across the bed, often too tired to undress, too tired to dream.

If I would have stayed in Germany, I don't think I would have had any chance to change for a little bit life.

So I finally decided if Otto was in America, I better be in America, too.

A telegram came from Otto, who was living on the West Coast.

It said, "Hanzel, get yourself a ticket to San Francisco on the Greyhound bus, and I will be waiting for you."

I didn't want to ride a bus, just something that everybody else would be doing.

No.

So I bought myself a yellow Maxwell convertible for $50 and set off West.

I barely got to Pittsburgh when it turned out that it wasn't a sound car.

The first thing I got was a flat.

Then I had trouble with the engine.

I was so scared that a cop would apprehend me because I had no papers, no license, no anything.

I don't even know if you needed a license.

It was a few days before Christmas, and it was so cold.

The wind had blown the top off, so my hands froze.

Then the windshield broke apart and blew right off.

I didn't have a camera with me.

I couldn't have used my fingers to press a trigger on the camera.

My feet, I couldn't use my feet anymore.

They were full of cold sores and cracks I was a mess.

But I didn't dare stop.

All I was thinking was Otto.

San Francisco.

Get there as fast as possible.

My car died as soon as I drove onto the ferry to go across San Francisco Bay.

But luckily Otto was waiting for me on the other side.

He was the most welcome sight.

He couldn't believe it that I made it.

He said, "In that tin can you made it across in that fish box hill?"

Otto: I had made the decision that now I was American.

And as long as Hitler was in power, I would speak English, and no word of German anymore.

And I was telling Hansel that when we get to my rooming house, that she should pretend to my landlady that she is my wife.

Hansel: But I misunderstood him.

I thought he said that when we get to my rooming house, I want you to know the landlady is my wife.

It's all I could make out from the gibberish he was talking to me which was evidently pretty good English, but I didn't speak that good English.

And so I was a pretty sad person.

I was sitting on that sagging bed of his and he went outside, and I heard him talk to who I thought was his wife.

And after a while, which was an eternity to me, he came back with a bowl of soup and saw me crying, and he asked, "What's the matter?"

I said, "You married your landlady?"

He said, "What?"

It dawned on him that I misunderstood him.

I cried, I did everything.

I was so angry, I hauled out and hit him in the face.

America was in the middle of the Depression, and hungry, broken men wandered the streets.

Otto and I couldn't find work in San Francisco, so we took off down the coast in search of jobs.

Everywhere we went, we saw people out of work and poor.

We began taking photographs of the people we were living alongside.

Then we started following the other cars to the fields, where we found work as migrant field hands.

Many of the families working in the fields had come from small farms in the Midwest that had been dried out and blown over by the Dust Bowl, now forced to work at slave wages.

When you were at your job, you worked as fast as you could to keep up with your neighbor on the other row.

I tried to keep up.

Sometimes I could, and sometimes I fell short.

I don't think you could allow yourself really to take time off.

You wanted to make a few pennies, and so you kept on working as long as you possibly could.

The pea picking was a dangerous thing.

It doesn't look like it, but the pea vine is very strong.

It cuts in your fingers, and before you know it, you have bloody sores all over your hands.

When I was 23, I gave birth to a baby girl on a bed prepared by Otto on a sand dune somewhere in Imperial Valley.

We named her Maria after my little sister who had died, and she grew up a migrant child.

The children played by the fields while the parents worked, until they were old enough to pick crops themselves.

If he was over 6, 7 years old, he was working alongside Mama and Papa, picking as fast as he or she could, filling their own little sack.

[camera click] In the mid-1930s, the workers began making demands for decent wages from the big farm owners.

The situation grew tense when the workers' demands were rejected.

[men yelling] With only headlights illuminating their meeting, the workers planned to strike and shut down hundreds of train shipments of food at the peak of summer.

The farmers retaliated by bringing in strikebreakers called goons to intimidate the workers.

The goons fired rock salt from their shotguns, and then the police arrived, firing tear gas into the crowds.

The strike was broken.

[camera click] Beverly: This is the kind of thing that you rarely see in a still photograph, in part because it was dangerous for people to involve themselves in these situations.

Maybe Dorothea Lange's <i>Migrant Mother</i> is a good example of the kind of photograph we're used to seeing where the victim is portrayed, the victim of poverty, is portrayed as a valiant person helping herself.

And then Hansel's photographs in the same area, same kinds of people, same period, shows the tension that happens when people who don't have enough do try to get more for themselves.

We were told many times not to photograph.

But if you do anything you are told by a superior, you wouldn't be anything.

You would have to crawl in a mouse hole under the ground.

Otto and I said, "This must be preserved here.

This must be shown."

[camera click] If we make a record of the time when people had to do that kind of labor to stay alive, people will remember when they didn't have a home, when they didn't have a bed, when they didn't have electricity, when they just had their bare necessities to survive.

We were working just like everybody there, so they did not resent our picture taking.

Otto and I tried quite surreptitiously to take pictures.

I mean, we stole it, but you couldn't keep that up, pretty soon an oversee saw you.

And he came up and said, "Get the hell out of here."

If you didn't go, he went for the whip.

They were swinging that thing around, and every so often you got something in your ear.

And sometimes I would get it on my fingers.

[whip crack] A very sharp pain, where they hit you.

They were beasts.

Up to this day, I do not know, was it an accident or was it a willful act?

That day in late November, 1933, I shall never forget until my dying day.

[typewriter] Otto had gone out with the camera.

I was busy in the tent, bending over the washtub.

Little Maria, not yet three years old, had crawled through the open flap of the tent, playing with her little kitten.

"Mother, look what I brought you."

She held the surprise covered in her cupped hands and skipped laughingly toward the entrance of the tent.

[screeching tires] Her voice was cut short by the screeching of heavy brakes.

I leapt toward the swerving braking truck, throwing myself under the wheels, searching with my mangled hands for little Maria.

I fell upon my dead child, weeping and loving her.

Otto threw his camera and ran to us, falling on his knees to take in what had happened.

A red-faced man gave me a shove with his foot.

"Stop that whimpering.

Why don't you take better care of your child?"

The driver got out.

He was drunk.

It was the foreman from the farm.

He said it was an accident.

"The child ran right in front of the truck."

"Who are those people?"

someone asked.

"Are they American?"

"They don't look like it."

"God knows where they come from."

The police turned to Otto.

"What did you say your name was?"

"Otto Haggle."

"Address."

"Place of birth."

"Purpose of visit."

"Citizenship."

Otto looked as if his mind had left him.

"You are German then."

The word "German" filled me with fear.

The Nazis were now the rulers.

Already our friends were thrown in prison.

We took down our tent and drove away from enemy territory.

[typewriter] Instead of coming closer together, Otto and I felt not enough protective of each other anymore.

I couldn't look in Otto's eyes.

I saw accusation in them.

I finally must have written him a note.

"Otto, I am leaving you.

Don't search for me."

Just went down the train track, tears streaming down my face, looking at my empty arms, not knowing what to do.

Always railroad tracks.

As if it would bring me to heaven, or to hell.

I thought because of a camera, I lost a child.

"Little mother, you have to pay the price," for us taking pictures on his farm.

I thought that black box was the reason for a long time.

And it was like touching an electric instrument.

For so long, my mind just fought against touching a camera.

Otto tracked me down and eventually we got back together.

Little by little, my courage came back.

And I finally felt well enough to actually take camera in my hand and try.

[camera click] Otto: Hansel and I came back to San Francisco.

We rented a room with a toilet, paid eight dollars and twenty-five cents a month.

The bedroom we made into a dark room, and we slept in an old tent that we set up on the roof to the amazement of our neighbors.

Hansel: I took my photographs of the migrant fields to the WPA, an agency set up by the Roosevelt Administration, to give work to unemployed artists during the Depression.

But they dismissed my photos as propaganda.

Then I met Maury Mendel of the Youth Project.

I opened my collection to him, that little collection, and then he smiled.

And all of a sudden he exploded, laughing and dancing me around and holding me in his arms and saying, "That's what we are looking for."

I had all of San Francisco as my territory, and I could pick my own projects.

So I focused on the immigrant communities around the city.

[Music] Peter Stackpole was a friend we met through a group of West Coast photographers that included people like Ansel Adams, Imogene Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Ed Weston and Van Dyke.

Peter's big project at the time was photographing the building of the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge, and the workers risking their necks to do it.

Peter: I was always hoping that I could get Hansel out on the bridge and let her climb around with me, but the bridge people couldn't see it that way.

Otto: While Peter was climbing around the bridge hundreds of feet over the bay, Hansel and I were on the streets of San Francisco, getting involved in the Longshoremen strike.

12,000 Longshoremen were fighting for union recognition and higher wages.

The numbers swelled to over 35,000 men, becoming the first industry-wide strik in shiping history.

[gun fire] Hansel: Otto and I were among a handful of photographers who supported the strikers and wanted to document the protest.

But the Longshoremen were suspicious of the media, who up until then had sided with the employers, accusing the workers of being communists.

Harry Bridges, the leader of the Longshoremen strike, gave us special permission to photograph the protest.

Otto and I were two of only a few people who had pictures of the strike.

Peter was now back in New York working for Life magazine as a photojournalist.

Peter: One day I was called by the managing editor to come up to his office and he said, "Do you know a photographer named Hansel Meath?"

And I said, "Well, I sure do.

She's good friend of mine out on the West Coast."

And he says, "Well, what's this that I hear about her photographing strikes and waterfront stuff?

Is she a communist?"

I said, "Well, I don't think she is.

I think she's a good liberal and risks her neck, taking a lot of pictures of a lot of things that are going on today."

And, well, that satisfied him.

And he said, "Well I don't give a darn what her politics are as long as she takes good pictures.

I'm going to send for her."

Hansel: Dave Harlebuch of Time Inc.

came out to our $8.25 a month apartment and proposed that I come out to New York and work for them.

I kept quiet and I just let him go on for a while with what he thought was an irresistible offer.

And finally I said, "I don't think I can work for your magazine."

And he said, "Why not?"

I said, "Because you are a capitalist magazine.

I happen to be not a capitalist exactly and I wouldn't like to fit in."

And he said, "We need people like you with a different point of view.

We have plenty of yes men."

And I believed him.

In 1937, in April, I signed up with them finally.

[camera clikc] We moved to New York so I could work for Life and Otto was freelancing.

Carl: Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth had the European point of view of how to tell a story in pictures.

And one must remember how only a few years ago they were wandering homeless German victims of the war.

Now in America they had become part of one of the most elite groups of journalists and people in New York.

Otto: I turned down life's offer to work for them.

I wanted to be a freelancer.

I knew what I could do and so did the magazine world so they snapped up my work.

I shot for Fortune and Vanity Fair among others, including Life, and became one of the most sought after freelance photographers in the magazine industry.

The managing editor of Life, Mr.

Ed Thompson, said, "Hansel, I gave you a bitch of an assignment."

He said, "I hope you ride a horse."

So, I said "Sure."

He knew I wasn't telling the truth.

I didn't know how to ride a horse.

Life sent me to the heart of Texas to shoot a story on working cowboys at the Matador Ranch.

Those horses went like flying machines, and I was trying to keep up with them with a Rolleiflex around my neck.

[music] You had to work with the sun very much and not shoot straight, ever.

You always have the sun as much backlighting your scene as possible.

Then you get your figures with a nice sheen around them.

Outlined.

They looked like they had swallowed a light and were glowing from the inside out if you get a good backlight.

The cowboys lived on the ranch full time, and once a month their wives brought the children out to visit.

So this would be on a Sunday?

That would be on a Sunday.

The children would come in.

They behaved so natural and so loving toward their little ones.

No, you had to take these pictures.

Georgia: Now the magazine didn't use that shot.

Hansel: No.

Maybe they didn't want to make the cowboys so human.

They had to be like the movies.

Anne: I think for any woman photographer, for the magazines in the 30s and the 40s, it was tough.

There were simply men out there, whether they were other photographers, whether they were the subjects that they were sent to photograph, who didn't approve of women even being there.

It had nothing to do with the quality of their work.

Hansel: After Texas, I went to New Mexico to shoot a story on Navajo sheep herders.

The owner of the land drove me into the desert and dropped me off by one of the Navajo dwellings.

Whenever I would get up to approach them, they would vanish.

This went on for three long days and nights.

I was feeling a little sick because there was a wind going from morning to night, from night to morning.

I had nothing but a few chocolates with me, and they were gone the first two days.

On my fourth morning, all the Navajos went to work as usual tending the sheep, except for a very pregnant girl who stayed behind.

And after a few hours, she approached me.

She came up to me then and asked who I was and why I was sitting here for days and days when nobody spoke to me.

She said the chief wanted to see me.

He asked me many questions, who I was, and I had to go through the whole story again.

Then he stretched out his hand and said, "Welcome to us."

And that night, for the first night, I slept in their company.

We really could understand each other.

It was something so much closer to humanity.

[airplane engines] I hardly ever saw Otto anymore.

He was travelling on assignments as much as I was.

So we'd run into each other at the airport.

"Hello."

"Goodbye."

"When will I see you?"

"I don't know."

Our relationship was going kind of sideways.

We were so close before.

One could start a sentence and the other was finishing it.

Now we felt more like strangers.

Our bags were always packed and ready to go.

[printing press] The FDR administration had just started the Social Security program, and my assignment said no more than "Go to North Platte, Nebraska, and show how Social Security works."

When I got there, the government officials were already there, ready to be photographed.

I set up the shots and photographed the government officials helping people out.

Then I heard about a group of workers who were meeting independently to organize a grassroots support system within their community.

I went down to one of their meetings and saw people drably dressed, sitting in a darkened hall.

So I set up my camera and flash.

Then I saw an old man who looked like a Polish immigrant, and when I looked closer, he had a little boy on his lap.

It hit me, and I said, "That's what I want to get."

Then I have a good beginning to that story.

I can hang some more pictures on that.

It turned out life didn't use the father and son photo, or any other shots from the workers' meeting.

They only printed the very much institutionalized shots, where it practically shows, "See.

the government is helping them out."

It wasn't a very cooperative story.

You cannot photograph without a point of view.

I wanted to make all of them more heroic characters of my people, and wanted to show That they had a life of their own that even a poor American can think for himself.

He actually has a brain, if you let him have one.

J.B.

: She was very aware that the editors were censoring, in effect, certain social truths that they didn't want to promote because their advertisers were against it, because they believed it was un-American, because it didn't suit their political stance, or whatever.

Life was very directive.

They had constant communication with their photographers.

The general mode of working was a photographer sent film back to the Life Lab in New York, and then there were multiple conferences.

A photographer was a small part of determining what actually got him to print.

Hansel: You become a little cynical.

You just say, "How can I get by without compromising myself?"

The magazine work was becoming more repetitive for me.

Most of the work I was getting didn't make much sense and it didn't seem that important.

Peter: Certain assignment editors just didn't think very clearly.

They thought Hansel was another one of them who would take everything and do it fairly well.

But they certainly wasted their time getting her to do wallpaper.

One night after work, I came home to our apartment.

I found another woman's bracelet carelessly dropped underneath our bed.

But before I could really think about what I had found, I had to leave on another assignment.

[airplane engines] Life sent me to Puerto Rico to photograph a colony of Rhesus monkeys that had been transported to the island for research purposes.

These animals were desperate.

They had just been snatched away from their home and put out there on an uninhabited island.

One day, I noticed one of the males wander away from the colony and go out into the open water.

My first thing was, "Go out there and chase that animal back.

Don't let him drown."

So I flung my camera over my shoulder and rushed into the water after it.

The monkey stopped and set up on an outcropping.

Peter: We don't know what was on that monkey's mind, but it became symbolic.

It became a great photograph and always will be.

Hansel: The monkey was kind of a turning point and was kind of a monkey on my back, so to say, because the scientists with whom I shot the story, they wanted me to take a year's leave of absence from life and come with them to Laos.

I wouldn't have done anything more than go with them.

I wanted to go with them.

So I approached my editor.

If he would give me a leave of absence.

And he said, "Under no circumstance, we need you here."

And I somehow got angry.

I was plagued by doubts about my life in New York.

Where were we headed?

Were we really doing anything worthwhile?

More and more I felt homesick for California.

We had a simpler life there, but he wouldn't hear of it.

He said, "Do you know how hard our living was out there?

And now you want to throw away everything to go back?

Back to misery?"

I badgered Life to transfer me to the West Coast anyway, and they eventually gave in.

When Otto was gone one day, I packed up my belongings, bought myself a new Mercury, and headed out West.

On my way to California, I stopped in Butte, Montana to do a story for Life about a school with only one teacher who taught all the grades.

I was in her classroom shooting when I noticed a man standing in the doorway.

It was Otto.

He came up to me and said, "Hansel, where you go, I go.

I'm sorry I was obstinate."

Otto: We found some land near Jack London's house in Northern California, and wrote a check for $5500 for all 468 acres.

That was a little better than pocket money for us, having come from New York.

But as soon as we bought the land, the money went out like water because it needed well drilling.

It needed roads making.

It needed house building.

It just needed everything you can think of to survive.

[dog barking] [explosions] When America entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Lieutenant General John DeWitt of the U.S.

Army to carry out his infamous Executive Order 9066, calling for the evacuation of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast.

11,000 were interned at Heart Mountain.

In 1942, Life sent Otto and me out to the Japanese internment camp at Heart Mountain.

It was in the middle of Wyoming in the dead of winter.

The temperature was 30 below as we drove up to the barracks.

Cold, cold and felt like a concentration camp.

Mike: The camp was constructed in about 62 days.

It took an average of 55 minutes to build one of those barracks buildings.

Bill: Unlike my father, I was an American citizen by birth.

Now that should mean something, but it didn't.

After Pearl Harbor, I was not considered American.

I was, because of my ancestry, because of my physical appearance, I was a Jap.

It was a great shock to be put in what amounted to chicken coops.

Hansel: I felt so sorry for the mothers, mainly that they had to take their little children to the bathroom, and they give them a bath.

And do all they chores for a large family.

In that icy cold, and in that miserable condition.

[bell tolling] Bill: What we resented most was feeling abandoned by our government.

My question to Roosevelt would be, "Why did you ignore the Bill of Rights?

Why did you accept this order based solely on race?

Didn't that mean something to you as the great leader of democracy?"

How are you Hansel?

Hansel: Jimmy!

Jimmy: Oh my... Hansel: My God.

Jimmy: I'm so happy to see you.

Hansel: Hello Jimmy.

Jimmy: How are you?

[camera click] Okay.

Mamoru: Hi, I'm so happy to see you again.

Hansel: How are you?

Mamoru: Hansel, you mentioned this was the first photograph.

Hansel: It was the first shot we made, coming to the camp.

Mamoru: You mentioned the bitter cold.

This was one of the consequences, that the pipes bust, and you and Otto went there in the middle of the night to take this photograph of people trying to repair the break.

Hansel: But the people that were inmates had to come and repair it.

Mamoru: Oh yes.

Hansel: They didn't get the repairman from the outside.

Mamoru: Hansel, your visit coincided with the death of Clarence Uno, who was a World War I veteran.

And he was accorded a full military funeral.

Hansel: So he was a World War I veteran, That and still was evacuated.

Jimmy: Veterans of World War I, and from the American armed forces that were evacuated, they voiced their anger in no uncertain terms.

They used to come in full uniform and complain about the fact, "Here's my American uniform.

Why am I here?"

Hansel: Life did not print the story about Heart Mountain.

The owner of Life, Henry Luce, and his editorial staff apparently didn't get what they expected from the photographs.

Mike: I think when Hansel and Otto go in and take their series of photographs, an individual can look at those photographs and see, at least in my opinion, a microcosm of life in any American city.

People in trouble, pulling together, relying on family, trying to put the pieces back together.

And I don't think those photographs fit Henry Luce's, or Luce's editors', interpretation of the confined enemy within that we conquered.

[music] [baby laughing] Hansel: On our last assignment for Life, right before we were blacklisted, Otto and I went back to our hometown in Germany, to document the effects of World War II on the people of Fellbach.

[bell ringing] We had so many questions.

Most of the people in our town had voted for Hitler.

How did they feel about that decision now?

Some told us they had supported Nazism in the beginning.

But as the war dragged on, they felt helpless and torn along.

Some felt remorse.

Some didn't.

Some were sorry.

Some were simply sorry they had lost the war.

Many felt they should have done something different in the past.

Now the truth was staring them in the face.

And they couldn't change their past actions anymore.

As I walked down the narrow cobblestone streets near my old home, I saw the window curtains pushed aside and felt the neighbor's eyes on me.

I remembered what it was like growing up in this small town.

This is my sister, Emma.

There are many, many terrible memories that disturb her greatly for her part she played in it.

She said, "We carry a heavy guilt, all of us."

[music] McCarthy: One Communist on the faculty of one university is one Communist too many.

Hansel: Everybody that did anything that was for the people, maybe for the poor, that was doing the right thing, if you were doing the right thing, you were taken in and accused.

Are you a member of the Communist conspiracy as of this moment?

Hansel: They wanted me as a witness out there, fingering other Americans, and I said, "Go to hell."

Otto and I refused to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and sign the Loyalty Oath.

In effect, they wanted us to rat on our friends in the labor movement.

During the McCarthy time, we couldn't get any more work in photography.

Our best friends in New York and Life magazine all of a sudden didn't know us anymore.

It's a funny feeling if you walk through a building, office after office, the door closes in front of you.

You cannot talk to anyone, and all of a sudden you realize at one time you were a very welcome commodity around here and all of a sudden nobody knows you.

After we were blacklisted, we went back to our home in Santa Rosa.

In order to survive, we turned to farming, raising chickens and a few cattle.

Otto took occasional freelance work as a photographer when he could get it, and I stayed behind and took care of the farm.

I also began to paint and write, drawing on my memories of the migrant years to inspire me.

I often had nightmares.

I was sitting on that outcropping, and I had that angry look, and I looked around me and next to me was that monkey, and he looked angry.

And then it was as if the monkey communicated with me, and said, "How long are we going to sit here like that?"

So I said, "I don't know till things get better."

"Why do you think they should get better?"

So, eventually I think we came to a conclusion that anger is not the thing, that you cannot sit on a little outcropping overly being angry, not in eternity.

(music) Georgia: I think when they photographed America, they brought a fresh perspective, and they have photographs, I can see them in my head as I speak, that show me my country in a way nobody else has.

Anne: Hansel Mieth's work will slowly get folded back into the history of photography to the point where eventually people won't know that she was ever missing.

She will get reevaluated, she will get rediscovered by another generation, and that's the way it should be.