John Gutmann (1905–1998) and Max Yavno (1911–1985) were photographers who spent most of their careers in California’s two largest cities of the mid-twentieth century. Gutmann fled Nazi persecution in Germany and immigrated to San Francisco in 1933 while Yavno, a native New Yorker, moved to California in 1945, living in San Francisco and Los Angeles. These contemporaries photographed prominent aspects of modern American life, especially in their adopted home state of California. From a pervasive car culture to street life, signage, architecture, and sports and entertainment, they emphasized urban grit and energy while revealing distinct ways of seeing.

Trained as an Expressionist painter in Germany, Gutmann approached these themes as a European in a new country, using the strong diagonals and daring, often low angles he learned from popular magazines in interwar Berlin to defamiliarize the everyday. Yavno’s more plainspoken and detached observations, by contrast, embody the prevailing direction of American photography of this era and his greater sociological impulse. Taken together, Gutmann and Yavno demonstrate how California was home to interconnecting, even conflicting strains in modern photography of the American scene.