In Germany he worked as a photojournalist for Presse Photo, left Germany in 1933, and in America found an exuberant car culture, a dizzying array of billboards and graffiti, a racially diverse citizenry, music and dancing in the streets and young women galore. He especially took an interest in the Jazz music scene.
Gutmann is recognized for his unique "worm's-eye view" camera angle, and at the time this approach to angle and framing was not widely used by American photographers. He enjoyed taking photos of ordinary things and making them seem special, like street photographers do.
Some of his images predate by two decades the kind of informal, lonely-in-America pictures that Robert Frank made famous in ''The Americans.''
"As a rule I do not like to explain my photographs, I want my pictures to be read and explored. I believe a good picture is open to many individual (subjective) associations. I am usually pleased when a viewer finds interpretations that I myself had not been aware of." – John Gutmann
skin by neurotype-on-discord
