John Gutmann (1905–1998) was
one of America’s most distinctive photographers. Born in Germany where he
trained as an artist and art teacher, he fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in
San Francisco, reinventing himself as a photo-journalist. Gutmann captured
images of American culture, celebrating signs of a vibrant democracy, however
imperfect. His own status as an outsider—a Jew in Germany, a naturalized
citizen in the United States—informed his focus on individuals from the
Asian-American, African-American, and gay communities, as well as his
photography in India, Burma, and China during World War II. Gutmann’s interests
in painting and filmmaking, his collections of non-Western art and artifacts,
and his pedagogy, all figure in a body of work at once celebratory and
mysterious.
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http://www.johngutmann.org/