"X Marks the Spot Where Ralph Will Die"
John Gutmann American, born Germany
Not on view
Trained as a painter, Gutmann fled Germany for America in 1933. In need of money, the artist began photographing across the country as a foreign correspondent for the tremendously popular picture magazines of his homeland, which had an insatiable appetite for all things American. What began as an assignment in exile--travelling from New York, Chicago, and Detroit to New Orleans and San Francisco--became a remarkable lifelong career in a new medium and country.
One of the earliest and most inventive practitioners of street photography, Gutmann was one of the great poets and chroniclers of a particularly American kind of city life--the endless supply of characters and spontaneous dramas set against a backdrop of skyscrapers, signs, and graffiti.
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