Judith Mara Gutman is a New York-based author of books on popular and academic topics, and a specialist in the field of social history of photography. Born in New York City in 1928 to Victor and Anna Markowitz, she graduated from Queens College, Flushing NY in 1949 and received her master's degree from Bank Street School of Education, New York, NY in 1950. She married the historian Herbert George Gutman in 1950, and the couple had two children, Marta and Nell.
Gutman's academic career began when she served as an instructor in psychology at University of Wisconsin, Madison and then as a lecturer in education at Hunter College. However, she began to address a wider public audience as an independent scholar after 1960. In the 1990s, she returned to academia, teaching courses on imagery and society at the New School for Social Research. Gutman has presented her work at academic conferences and universities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia and is the author of six books.
Her first book, The Colonial Venture: An Autobiography of the American Colonies from Their Beginnings to 1763 (1966) presented American colonial history from the perspective of a social historian. Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience (1967), considered by reviewers to be a model biography of the photographer, marked the beginning of her work in photography. The Making of American Society (1972), co-authored with Edwin Rozwenc of Amherst College, was conceived as an American History college text book. It consisted of a running text and sixteen visual essays by Gutman. She described her works Is American Used Up? (1973) as poetic nonfiction, and Buying (1975) as in the vein of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage and Buckminster Fuller's I Seem to be a Verb. Both books were printed in paperback and continued her experimentation with ideas within the visual field. Through Indian Eyes, (1982) published by Oxford University Press, was a comprehensive history of photography in India. She curated an exhibition of the same name at the International Center of Photography in New York.
From the guide to the Judith Mara Gutman papers, 1945-1999, 1969-1999, (The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.)
