Currently on view at The Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta through January 15, Culture Shock: Photography by John Gutmann affords a welcome opportunity to assess the work of a neglected master whose outsider status in the United States in the 1930s produced some of the most innovative and absorbing photographs of the period.
Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1905 to a secular Jewish family, Gutmann trained initially as painter. In 1930, seeking to further his training, Gutmann arrived in Berlin, a city where the latest art movements such as Dadaism, Constructivism, Futurism and the burgeoning Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) all passed as common coin.
This climate would mark Gutmann’s work indelibly, even as he was forced to abandon a professional career as a painter and art teacher under the Nazis’ 1933 Professional Service Restoration Act, denying employment to all non-Aryans.
With his professional art career scrubbed by the Nazis, Gutmann turned, out of sheer necessity, to photography. Purchasing a Rolleiflex camera, he read the instructions, shot three rolls of test photos, and rather remarkably obtained a contract as a foreign correspondent with an agency based in Europe. He then set sail for America, arriving in San Francisco on January 1, 1934.
Gutmann’s outsider status in his adopted country, combined with his immersion in Weimar modernism, helped shape what was soon to become a startlingly unique career as a photographer.
It was as groundbreaking and captivating as that of more well-known figures such as Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, photographers whose work Gutmann often parallels and anticipates.
Organized around themes such as Automobile Culture, Signage, Portraiture, In the Streets and Warning Signs, the Breman exhibit gives a strong sense of the variety of Gutmann’s output while also capturing his almost anthropological approach to his subject matter. (He himself organized his photographs under classifications such as “Documents of the Street.”) And of these various motifs, perhaps none is more important to Gutmann than his fascination with American car culture, the section the Breman exhibit leads with.
Arriving in the United States, Gutmann was almost immediately struck by what he called the “enormous, almost erotic relationship between the American and his automobile.” His photographs of American car culture — drive-ins, dealership billboards, automobiles and street scenes — function as studies of commodity culture. Automobile Transport, Chicago (1936), for example, features a car carrier, a phenomenon that Gutmann has said he found almost preposterous.
The sheer size of American cars, unheard of in Europe, also intrigued him. The humorous, almost sexual image at the center of the photo of a car mounted on top of another betrays Gutmann’s fascination with American opulence even at a time of economic disaster, a tendency that sets him apart from contemporary photographers such as Evans or Dorothea Lange. The crisscrossing phone wires, trolley cables and signs announcing, “for rent,” “drugs,” and “Loop Theater” capture the era’s fascination with speed, mobility and transience.
These motifs are echoed in another spectacular image from the exhibit’s section on Signage, a photo titled American Altar (1936), in which the repeated “Switch to Dodge” billboard slogan signals (as does the photo’s title) modernity’s fetishization of the automobile and the need to be up-to-date.
Aside from capturing the speed and affluence of consumer society, Gutmann’s photos of the ‘30s and ‘40s augur not only the discontent and isolation that we’ve come to associate with consumer culture but some darker themes, too.
From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge (1947) offers a breathtaking shot from atop the famous bridge, with guy wires cutting diagonally through the left side of the frame. The tiny cars passing on the street far below, dwarfed by the impressive architecture and dizzying, expressionistic camera angle, seem to evoke a sense of anonymity and isolation.
Similarly, Thanksgiving, Camp Roberts (1942) depicts a mesmerizing sea of people, as the individual gives way to what Gutmann’s contemporary, Weimar cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, called the mass ornament, an ominous development for those sensitive to its implications.
Gutmann’s interest in the rise of fascism becomes explicit in the section of the exhibit devoted to Warning Signs, photos that depict the coming war and reflect on America’s own flirtation with violence and fascism. In Omen (1934), for example, three planes soar in silhouette against a grey sky with a group of five figures, also in silhouette, watching from below.
Most hauntingly of all, his 1935 shot of a Nazi rally organized by the German consulate in San Francisco City Hall shows the American flag displayed alongside the Nazi swastika, the grandeur of the interior evoking the kind of neoclassical spaces designed by Albert Speer and featured so prominently in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Gutmann once said: “I want my pictures to be read and explored.” The Breman’s current exhibit offers a wonderful opportunity to do just that, to engage with an underappreciated master. His thorough appreciation of modern art and detached, outsider status place him among more familiar practitioners such Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank.
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Robert Stalker is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who covers modern and contemporary art.
