After escaping the growing climate of oppression that dominated Germany in 1933, a nation that seemed to have surrendered to the current of totalitarianism, John Gutmann found a liberating force in North American society—particularly in its popular traditions—for its dynamism and heterogeneity. Going against the grain, to a certain extent, his images present a side of North American popular culture that was absent in the work of most of the country’s photographers who focused on portraying the social effects of the Great Depression. In this context, Gutmann’s gaze was able to re-enchant North American realities capturing their singularities from a foreigner’s perspective by virtue of his audacious compositions and his use of unusual angles.

Many of his first photographs were intended for publication in the press. However, their immediacy did not simply respond to the constrictions of the journalistic format, instead they were a product of his singular experience in the United States of the 1930s. Gutmann’s photographs frequently privilege expressive values over documentary clarity and technical perfection. They permeate the vibrant sensuality of the street. The portraits he took during Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1937 are a clear example. The lifelike ambiguity that is inherent in his images stands out and becomes the registry of a point of view that is permanently open to spontaneous wonderment.