John Gutmann, New Deal and Chicago

John Gutmann, a painter who left Germany in 1933 and reinvented himself as an optimistic photographic chronicler of Depression-era America, died in San Francisco with was 93 years old. In the America of the 1930's, Mr. Gutmann found an exuberant car culture, a dizzying array of billboards and graffiti, a racially diverse citizenry, music and dancing in the streets and young women galore. He photographed them all.

Many of his pictures are photojournalistically straightforward, modern photojournalism having developed in Germany in the late 1920's. A fair number of his pictures also show the influence of the avant-garde that flourished in Europe in the late 20's and early 30's and that was to determine the course of photography for the next 50 years.

Mr. Gutmann's ''Elevator Garage'' (Chicago, 1936), for example, has the distinctive bold, tilted angle and arresting cropping of Russian Constructivism. ''Web of Light,'' in which the shadows of a grid fall on the face and torso of a young woman, is uncannily reminiscent of Alexander Rodchenko's ''Girl With Leica,'' but the pictures were taken in 1934 on different continents. ''Turning to Look'' (1935) is the sort of extreme close-up portraiture used by avant-garde masters like Max Burchartz.

The text is a reworked excerpt of the news published by The New York Times after his death in June 1998.