John Gutmann, an expressionist painter in the manner of Die Brücke, arrived in the United States in 1933 to photograph Depression-era America with a Rollei camera for Press-Foto, a German agency. He settled in California and continued to take photographs for the German illustrated weeklies. In the late 1930s he switched to a new press agency, and his work began to be published in American magazines.
Gutmann was fascinated by Eastern urban culture, and his photojournalistic style and subject matter were quite distinct from that of his Californian contemporaries, William Mortensen, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams. Gutmann made a trip across America in 1936, staying several months in New York City before making his way back to the West Coast. Like the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, who twenty years later also made a cross-country odyssey, Gutmann sought ordinary people and events as his subjects and captured the mundane in a way that prompts the observer to insight.
Gutmann always provided captions for his photojournalism assignments and carried this practice over to his own work. Black Jack at Reno at Election Time, depicting players as intent as stockbrokers before the chalkboard roster of odds, becomes a more potent image when the ordinary yet insular activity of gambling is juxtaposed with the auspicious event of an election.
