JOHN GUTMANN A MORDANT EYE

摘要

The popular visual conception of the Great Depression has been largely shaped by the photographers who worked under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. Once seen, Dorothea Lange's migrant mother huddled with her hungry children, Arthur Rothstein's farmer and sons leaning into the teeth of an Oklahoma dust storm, or Walker Evans' impoverished tenant farmers remain forever embedded in memory. In these and countless similar photographs, the Depression is invariably evoked in terms of poverty and hardship. Yet there was one prominent photographer active during the 1930s who sailed against the prevailing social-documentary currents. John Gutmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in San Francisco in 1933 and never left, was the odd man out of Depression era image-makers. Although he, too, used his camera to highlight certain harsh realities of those years, he invariably injected an amusingly surreal twist or unexpected narrative contrast.