Biography

John Guttman’s photographs embrace the vitality and quirkiness of San Francisco’s street life. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who focused on the hardships and struggles suffered by the American people during the Great Depression, Guttman photographed what he believed to be a peculiar and dynamic society. His works provide what art historian Sally Stein calls “a nervous antidote to the generic New Deal social document of defeated citizens.”1 At once socially revealing, visually engaging, and artistically ambitious, Guttman’s images locate the extraordinary in ordinary life and often build a haunting and suggestive portrait of urban experience.

The son of upper-middle-class Jewish parents, Guttman fled Germany as a young man in the face of Hitler’s rising regime. Following the advice of a close friend who told him “There is only one country in the world to go, the United States; there is only one state, California; and there is only one city, San Francisco,”2 Guttman arrived in San Francisco on New Year’s Day, 1933. His infatuation with the city began immediately. To him, San Francisco represented the pulse of life in a country that was deeply mired in the Great Depression. A refugee from the political and social unrest of Germany, Guttman did not see the destitution and poverty of the times. Instead, he focused on the amazing energy of the growing city. “I photographed the popular culture of the United States differently from American photographers. I saw the enormous vitality of the country. I didn’t see it as suffering. The urban photographers here took pictures that showed the negative side of the Depression, but my pictures show the almost bizarre, exotic qualities of the country.”3

In 1936 after working independently for nearly three years, Guttman landed a part-time position at San Francisco State University, where he joined the faculty as a full-time professor in 1938. Guttman was instrumental in shaping the direction of the school’s art program during the mid-1940s, introducing courses in fine art photography and modern art history, and imbuing them with the same spirit of enthusiasm and adventure that is evident in his photographs.

Formally educated as a painter in Germany under the tutelage of Otto Muller, Guttman’s images quietly reveal his German Expressionist training through their diagonals, varied points of view, and intense contrast between light and dark. In constructing the images using these elements of composition, Guttman blurred the line between realism and his own adapted style of surrealism. In Death Stalks the Fillmore, the artist set up an intriguing and wholly enigmatic scene. We see Guttman’s wife, a surrealist artist, walking briskly down the street with cars parked unremarkably along the curb in front of a café in the background. She is clothed in typical 1930s-style polka-dot dress with gloved hands and covered head. The veil falling from her hat casts a menacing shadow across her face, causing her to appear cadaverous. The title, Death Stalks the Fillmore, suggests that this is an ominous image, but despite the eerie mood of the photograph, it retains an element of playfulness—Guttman’s young wife has been slighted by the tricks of unrelenting shadows. In effect, she becomes an example of the idiosyncratic experience of urban living, in which the glimpse of a passerby can create a lasting impression. Typical of his oeuvre, this photograph captures a fleeting moment on the streets of San Francisco and endows it with ambiguity. As Guttman once wrote, “ambiguity is an essence of life. In this sense I am not interested in trying desperately to make art, but I am interested in relating to the marvelous extravagance of life.”4 —L.W.

1. Sally Stein, “The Ventriloquist’s Duet,” in John Guttman: Parallels in Focus (San Francisco: San Francisco State University, 1997), 5.
2. Mark Johnson, ed., “Interview with John Guttman,” originally conducted by Holloway Historians, in John Guttman: Parallels in Focus, 10.
3. John Guttman, quoted in David Bonetti, “Acclaimed artist founded creative photo program at S.F. State,” San Francisco Examiner, 13 June 1998.
4. John Guttman, quoted in Margaret Loke, “John Guttman, 93, Painter Who Became a Photographer,” The New York Times, 17 June 1998.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Gutmann, a self-taught photographer, was an avid photographic chronicler of America during the depression; he taught art at San Francisco State College until 1973.

---

Your current search criteria is: Artist is "John Gutmann".