When John Gutmann arrived in San Francisco in 1933 he encountered a situation that was different from the one he had left behind in Berlin. From an artistic point of view, the modest cultural life of 1930s San Francisco was a liberating escape from the intense pulse of the artistic avant-garde in Berlin. However, what captured his attention above all else was the rich and surprising North American reality, which became the catalyst that would fuel his creative drive with his camera. In 1936, the year in which he started working as a professor at San Francisco State College, he went on a long journey through several parts of the country. In contrast to the growing homogenization of German life, the American way of life—with its yearnings, shadows, and dissidences—embodied a vigorously heterogeneous experience of modernity throughout the country’s expansive and varied territories.

Gutmann’s gaze is akin to that of an astonished foreigner who is marveled by the mundane details, particularly the multiple iterations of popular culture: from Jazz to automobiles to advertising. However, beyond his identity as a foreigner, Gutmann’s ability for making a vision of the ordinary under the guise of the marvelous is one of the key traits of avant-garde poetics of defamiliarization.