An exile from his native Germany, where he had graduated as an industrial engineer, worked as a motion picture technician, and lived under the threat of Nazism, Hans Gutmann Guster (1911–1982) began his career as a selftaught photographer in the 1930s.

Testimonies to a wandering life, his images taken in Europe also reflect his closeness to Leftist political movements. During the Spanish Civil War, under the name of Juan Guzmán, he served the Republican cause as a brigade volunteer and photographer.

Like other refugees from Spain, he found asylum in Mexico, where he worked as a photojournalist. Working for Mexican newspapers and magazines and as a correspondent for Time-Life, Guzmán undertook to document events of the most varied nature in a complex and contradictory country.

Over the years he build up an impressive archive of images from his reportages, commissions, and travels. A selection from these thousands of images, most of which have never been published before, has now been gathered into this book. Juan Guzmán is a publication of remarkable range that reappraises the talent of an atypical German-Spanish-Mexican photographer, revealing the narrative potential of his iconographic memory.