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1939–1941 — LIFE looks at South Bend
Two assignments: The national picture magazines sent their own photographers, and two of the visits survive in the LIFE record. In August 1939 Hansel Mieth — the German-born photographer who, with Otto Hagel, had made the defining documentary work of California's migrant and labor world — photographed in this city for LIFE under the title "Census, South Bend, Ind.," the picture held today in the Time/LIFE collection: the federal census machinery arriving in an ordinary American industrial city, seen by one of the era's great documentary eyes. In 1941 George Strock, a LIFE staff photographer, photographed the women workers of the Bendix plant — the defense mobilization bringing women onto the production lines of the city's great aviation supplier a year before Pearl Harbor made it a flood. Neither photographer was of South Bend; both were the national press picturing the city for a national audience, and their frames — a census taker's round, women at the Bendix benches — are the city's portrait as the country saw it on the eve of the war. The wartime plant record here ran through these magazine and company channels, for a reason the next entry states.
Sources:
- Time/LIFE photographic collection (via Google Arts & Culture) — Hansel Mieth, "Census, South Bend, Ind.," LIFE, August 1939; George Strock, women workers at the Bendix plant, LIFE, 1941.