John Gutmann

John Gutmann was a German-born American photographer and painter.

Berlin was the greatest city in the world when I lived there - in the late 1920s, early 1930s. It was the most sophisticated, the most decadent city, and it attracted the most powerful assembly of creative talents in the world. The greatest theater, movies, art. Everyone was there... [San Francisco was] very refreshing to me. I had had enough of art with a capital A, culture with a capital K. It was liberating to come to a place so backward in art and aesthetics.

Being Jewish, he was unable to exhibit his paintings or get a job teaching in Nazi Germany, and so he emigrated to the United States, arriving in San Francisco in late 1933. Gutmann reinvented himself as a photographer before he left Germany, purchasing a Rolleiflex and signing a photojournalism contract with Presse-Photo in 1933. He continued to work as a photojournalist for Presse-Photo from the West Coast until he signed on with PIX in 1936, an agency he worked with until 1962.

After arriving in San Francisco, one of the first news stories he documented was the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike. His work on other stories was later published in popular contemporary newsmagazines such as Time, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post. Some of his photographs of the Golden Gate International Exposition were published in Life in 1939. At the same time, he started teaching at San Francisco State College in 1936 and founded the photography department there in 1946.

In between, Gutmann served with the United States Office of War Information during World War II.Gutmann taught at SF State until 1973. After his retirement, he began printing images from his archives, and began exhibiting his work at the Fraenkel Gallery and Castelli Graphics in the late 1970s. His work was later packaged into a traveling exhibition, "Beyond the Document", which moved from SFMOMA to the Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art starting in 1989.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023