DESPERTAR LAGUNERO Libro Que Relata La Lucha Y Triunfo De La Revolución En La Comarca Lagunera (AWAKENING IN THE COMARCA LAGUNERA A Book that Recounts the Struggle and Triumph of the Revolution in the Comarca Lagunera). Text by José Reyes Pimentel, Photographs by Enrique Gutmann. Front cover design by Alfonso Maldoado, back cover design by Salvador Pruneda. Published by Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, México City, 1937. Text in Spanish. First edition, first printing limited to 40,000 examples. Softcover, illustrated wrappers, 9" x 6.75", 287 numbered pages, illustrated with 31 full page b&w photographic plates and 126 in-text photographs, designs and musical notation. GOOD CONDITION: spine covering chipped at the bottom edge, light bottom fore-edge bump, a penned gift inscription from Charles Gauld, Library of Congress on the ffep, and light wear from age and use, otherwise tight, bright, clean and unmarked. Scarce.

A Mexican post revolutionary modernist photobook that brilliantly reveals the struggles and triumphs of the 1937 anti fascist revolution in Mexico. Gutmann's photographic work promotes Mexico as a progressive nation and is itself a high point of working class mobilization and artistic collaboration that reveals the fundamental role artists had in constructing a new national identity. Artists and worker movements were mobilized and radicalized during the six year presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). The solidarity of the Mexican working class catalyzed a democratic and socialist order out of which Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios, LEAR (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) an important artists collective arose in 1934. Gutmann promoted a socialist concept of Mexico, his photography provided a modernist discourse to promote the nation as modern. Featured in Horacio Fernandez, The Latin American Photobook. Despertar Lagunero is considered one of the finest Latin photobooks produced in the revolutionary spirit of the times. Gutmann, a German Jewish exile who came to Mexico in 1934 immediately joined LEAR. During the 1930s he was an influential journalist and editor with direct access to the president. Gutmann published photographs in the LEAR journal Frente a Frente (Face to Face), in various newspapers, as well as in Gustoavo Ortiz Hernan's novel Chimeneas (another standout photo book of the period).

Photographer Enrique (Heinrich) Gutmann (b. Lithuania 1906-1950 d. Mexico City) Jewish German exile, anti fascist activist, propagandist, journalist, editor, photographer and photo montage artist whose work conferred nationalism and promoted Mexico as progressive nation. Fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany, Gutmann emigrated to Mexico in 1934 a year after the book burnings and Reichstag fire in Germany. He emigrated with his wife of Mexican heritage, who had been compelled by the Reich Ministry to prove she was a pureblood German. His arrival in Mexico was marked by Lázaro Cárdenas's quest for a socialist democratic Mexico, a perfect refuge from European fascism and totalitarian regimes. Gutmann died in Mexico City at the age of 44 after being struck by a car.