Juan Guzmán (photographer)

Juan Guzmán (born Hans Gutmann Guster, also known as "Juanito", 28 October 1911 – 1982) was a German born Mexican photojournalist. He was known as a war photographer of the Spanish Civil War and later on his work with Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

File:Marina Ginesta.jpg

Marina Ginestà at the top of Hotel Colón in Barcelona, 21 July 1936.

Hans Gutmann was born in Cologne. In 1936 he joined the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer of the International Brigades. Gutmann later became a Spanish citizen and changed his name to Juan Guzmán. There are more than 1,300 photographs from the Spanish Civil War in the archive of Agencia EFE (Madrid). His most famous image is the picture of 17-year-old Marina Ginestà standing in top of Hotel Colón in Barcelona. It is one of the most iconic photographs of the Spanish Civil War.

After the war Guzmán fled to Mexico, where he arrived in 1940. He worked for major Mexican magazines and newspapers and became a friend of Frida Kahlo with whom Guzmán shared similar political views. In the 1950s he took a large number of photographs of Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. Guzmán also photographed the artwork of Mexican painters like Gerardo Murillo, Jesús Reyes Ferreira and José Clemente Orozco. Juan Guzmán died in Mexico City in 1982.