Sigismund Blumann

Sigismund Blumann was a prominent tastemaker in Californian photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area for his entire career, he edited magazines, wrote books, and made creative photographs. From 1924 to 1933 Blumann edited Camera Craft, the leading West Coast photographic monthly. Subsequently he established his own periodical, Photo Art Monthly, which he published until 1940. In these two magazines — for over fifteen years — Blumann found a large audience of mainstream pictorial photographers. In addition, he wrote five instructional books on photography, providing a substantial amount of technical information for committed picturemakers. During the 1920s, Blumann also made accomplished pictorial photographs of his own, concentrating on landscape work. After the middle of the twentieth century, however, his visibility diminished quickly, due to his own inactivity and a growing disdain for pictorialism.