Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring, San Francisco, 1936. John Gutmann

When John Gutmann released his camera’s shutter, Marjorie Gestring may have been ascending or descending in her dive, but in the picture the Olympic gold medalist levitates in the pause bridging ascent and descent. The artist himself emphasized the tension of the moment by mounting the photograph eccentrically. Gutmann, an accomplished painter before immigrating to the United States as a photoreporter in 1933, lived in San Francisco.