‘American Character: Surprising Portraits of an Unseen Nation’
By Peter Guttman
Skyhorse, 264 pages

“Character counts” are the first two words of Peter Guttman’s introduction to photographs taken over four decades, accompanied by compact musings on the persons and places of a diverse continent. “American Character” reflects a desire to encompass a diversity that challenges the idea of a unified American identity transcending regional differences, heritages, religions, and lifestyles.

What is distinctively American — no matter where you look — is what Mr. Guttman deems a “delicate equipoise between individual freedom and a common good.” Politics, he implies, may upset that equipoise — he likens it to sitting “on the seesaw” — but his photographs, like Walt Whitman’s poetry, paradoxically restore faith in a “more perfect union” of opposites. 

One of the first photographs is of a retired zinc prospector in the Ozarks, whose “deeply etched” facial creases remind Mr. Guttman of the “craggy landscape of local holler-filled mineral-rich hills, once teeming with underground workers scurrying beneath hardened caps lit by kerosene and lard.” That Mr. Guttmann is a fine writer, as well as a connoisseur of people and places, is evident in his comments on the miner’s “wrinkled facial topography” that serves as a “dermal roadmap charting the worrying plight of those left behind in an increasingly technological world.”

How the photographs are placed in this exquisitely composed book reveals as much about the American character as Mr. Guttman’s prose. So the corrugation of the miner’s face is followed by that of a beekeeper with a swarm of bees surrounding his face like a beard that is also his colony.

You will learn a lot about bees and beekeepers in just two paragraphs, that begin: “There’s an obvious reason that often-dreaded parental discussion about birds and bees gets employed as a preamble for understanding life’s development.” That word, preamble, is so apt in portraying the American constitution.

Sometimes, as Mr. Guttman confesses in his introduction, he is just having fun — as in the two-shot portrait of a farmhouse couple, who are right out of a famous Grant Woods painting, “American Gothic.” Well, he’s doing more than just having fun. Here is how Mr. Guttman introduces an Eldon, Iowa, couple in their country clothes: “Iowans’ cold, chip-on-the shoulder attitudes as portrayed by local resident Meredith Wilson in that acclaimed 1962 Tony-winning theatrical, The Music Man, captured not only a portrait of stoic Midwestern sensibilities but also the first Grammy ever won for Best Musical.”

If only Whitman were alive to catalog Mr. Guttman’s lineup of American types that are so well put together that they become individuals — like the “Aging Hippie” at Woodstock, New York; the “Prostitute Impressionist” at Dodge City, Kansas; the “Pueblo Patriarch” at Taos, Pueblo, New Mexico; the “Rattlesnake Wrangler” at Sweetwater, Texas; the “Eel Trapper” at Hancock, New York; the “Cotton Field Worker” at Mattson, Mississippi, to cite only a small number in this national gallery.

Sometimes Mr. Guttman has explaining to do, as in the photograph of a “Ramp Forager” at Richwood, West Virginia, the “ramp capital of the world,” where something like “two thousand pounds of odoriferous vegetables are cooked at this Feast of the Ramson and served as crowned ramp queens flash their smiles amid flavor-bursting meals.” There are repercussions, though, such as the “three-day stench from stinky bulbs … hardly remedied by this town’s mayor who greets each arriving diner at the door with one free breath mint.”

You can’t make this stuff up. Mr. Guttman has the proof — as in the photograph of the Titusville, New Jersey, “Wheat Reaper”: “The Roman goddess of agriculture is Ceres, who helped to christen the word cereal, a grass whose cultivation has been foundational to human civilization.” The practically minded are shown how it’s done.

Want to know about “Flax Scutchers” at Stahlstown, Pennsylvania? Get the book: I’m not going to do all your work for you. When you do that, you will finally understand what it takes to be a “Cranberry Bog Gatherer” at Chatsworth, New Jersey, where it’s not the shore that entices but the Ocean Spray “cooperative growers” who have been at it since the 1930s. 

This review does not do justice to half of what “American Character” has to display — like an “Alphorn Player,” a “Prominent Swamp Raconteur,” and a visit to a “Testicle Festival.” 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”