John Gutmann
[Photographer, b. 1905, Breslau, Germany, (now Wroclaw, Poland), d. 1998, San Francisco, California.]

 To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting. 
 Content to me is very important, but I like it when [the photograph] is also enigmatic. If you don’t know what it is you begin to speculate, and that is what I want. 
 As a rule I do not like to explain my photographs, I want my pictures to be read and explored. I believe a good picture is open to many individual (subjective) associations. I am usually pleased when a viewer finds interpretations that I myself had not been aware of. 
 I believe that some of my best images have [the] ambiguity which is an essence of life. In this sense I am not interested in trying desperately to make Art but I am interested in relating to the marvelous extravagance of Life.