Frederick Sommer

From Landscape Architecture to Photography

Sommer was born in Italy in 1905, grew up in Brazil, and studied landscape architecture at Cornell University in the 1920s.^*1 After treatment for tuberculosis, he moved to Arizona in 1931 and made Prescott his long-term base. The arid desert terrain and the slow decay of material in that environment became recurring physical conditions in his later work.^*2

Arizona

Sommer had already worked in drawing and painting and maintained strong interests in music and writing, so the camera did not suddenly replace other media as his sole means of expression.^*3 Encountering Edward Weston’s photographs in 1933, visiting Alfred Stieglitz in 1935, and later developing a relationship with Weston were important in showing Sommer how photographic precision could serve imaginative work.^*4

Man Ray and Ernst

He later associated with Max Ernst, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, Aaron Siskind, and others, moving within an environment that crossed photography, Surrealism, abstraction, and collage.^*5 Sommer did not bind his work to a single stylistic label. Across different techniques, he continued to search for connections among forms and meanings.^*15

The landscape architecture Sommer studied before taking up photography trained him to read the placement and relationships of different elements rather than treating nature primarily as a “beautiful view.”^*1 After moving to arid Arizona for his health, he came to see the desert as a dense surface of stones, plants, animal remains, and human-made objects rather than as a majestic landscape organized around a horizon.^*2 Seen against this background, the densely detailed fields that recur in his later photographs are tied to a way of reading environments through relations among parts, not simply to a later application of Surrealist strangeness.^*4

The Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation chronology records that in 1938 he acquired an 8×10 Century Universal, began making still lifes of chicken heads and entrails, and turned to distant desert views after obtaining a longer-focus lens.^*21 This sequence makes it possible to understand carcasses and landscapes as continuous investigations of form at different distances with the same large-format camera, rather than as unrelated interests.^*1

Western Photography and Surrealism

Sommer’s intensive engagement with photography in Arizona began in the late 1930s, when Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and others were establishing the precise description of the large-format camera as a major value of modern photography, while European Surrealism was entering the United States through émigré artists and exhibitions. MoMA’s American Surrealist Photography traces how photographers in Europe and the United States incorporated Surrealist ideas and techniques from the 1930s through the mid-1950s.^*28 While Weston encouraged Sommer to use a large-format camera, Sommer also maintained a relationship with Max Ernst and photographed the Arizona desert as an overfull field of connected details rather than as a grand natural vista.^*25 What makes his photographs distinctive is that he did not treat the precision of straight photography as the opposite of Surrealism. He used exact description itself to destabilize perception.

8×10 and Contact Printing

When Sommer began using an 8×10 view camera in 1938, his available lens did not adequately cover the full plate at long distances. He therefore turned to close-range still lifes, collecting discarded chicken heads and entrails from a butcher to photograph.^*6 《Chicken Entrails》the entrails are neither blurred nor merely suggested for shock. Wrinkles, membranes, gloss, and overlapping matter are rendered with precision, undoing the hierarchy of “beautiful subjects” assumed by conventional still-life photography.^*7

Carcasses and Entrails

After obtaining a longer-focus lens, Sommer turned the same large-format camera toward the desert and made the Arizona Landscape series with the sky excluded from the frame.^*8 Arizona Landscape, 1943eliminates the horizon so that cacti, rocks, shrubs, and ground detail continue from edge to edge with nearly equal visual intensity, weakening the usual distinction between “subject” and “background” created by perspective.^*9

Getty connects Sommer’s idea that objects decay slowly and exchange characteristics in the arid West with his photographs of animal remains within the material cycle of the desert.^*10 Death is not staged here as a dramatic event. A skinned, desiccated coyote occupies the same visual density as soil and plants, allowing the boundary between living and nonliving matter to be observed as form.^*11

The 8×10 negative and contact print were crucial to Sommer’s choice of subjects. Instead of obscuring them through enlargement grain, the process could register feathers, fragments of flesh, stones, dry soil, and cut paper edges with precision and hold them within the same dense tonal field.^*6 《Chicken Entrails》is compelling because it does more than present entrails for shock; it makes them demand the same visual attention as a landscape or an abstract form.^*7 Precision becomes a means of looking at all forms in reality with comparable intensity, including those culturally assigned little value, rather than a tool for “objective” classification.^*3

Landscapes Without a Horizon

The horizonless Arizona Landscape photographs perform the same operation. Removing the sky and horizon that normally organize depth turns the desert from a receding vista into a field across which innumerable forms spread with relative equality.^*8 《Arizona Landscape》offers no fixed point that must be treated as the “main subject,” so the viewer’s attention continues to move among details.^*11 Because this structure persists through animal remains, cut paper, collage, and camera-less work, Sommer’s varied production does not need to be divided into unrelated bodies of work by subject.^*17

Arizona Landscape prints held by the Met and the Amon Carter Museum largely exclude sky and horizon, confirming a composition in which stones, shrubs, and soil continue to the edges of the image.^*22 In the Amon Carter’s 1943 photograph as well, the experience of the image lies in moving across details rather than being directed toward a single point that organizes depth.^*23

《Valise d’Adam》

《Valise d’Adam》began as a three-dimensional construction assembled from found objects and fragments of a doll, which Sommer then unified on a single surface through a gelatin silver photograph.^*12 As Getty’s interpretation notes, the richly toned print brings disparate materials onto the same visual surface, creating new relationships among fragments that have lost their original uses.^*13

Camera-less Negatives

Photographs of doll fragments such as Venus, Jupiter and Mars evoke Surrealist bodily transformation, yet their precision as photographs preserves both fantasy and material fact at once.^*14 By the late 1950s, Sommer was making camera-less negatives from oil-painted cellophane or smoke deposited on glass, extending photography to a point where recording the external world through a lens was no longer a necessary condition of the medium.^*16

Treating these works as a list of separate “experiments” obscures Sommer’s continuity. As a National Gallery of Art exhibition organized around the idea of “bonds” suggested, deserts, carcasses, found objects, images, drawings, and music can all be understood through the same effort to discover formal and semantic connections among things that appear distant from one another.^*17 Photography mattered within this larger project because it could preserve existing things in minute detail while establishing new relationships through arrangement and framing.^*18

Music and Structure

Sommer’s simultaneous work in photography, drawing, collage, and musical notation was not a sideline outside the professional category of “photographer.” He was interested in finding formal correspondences among different materials and signs and connecting distinct systems within a single work.^*18 In works made with camera-less negatives and glass, photography departs from recording the external world through a lens and becomes a surface that receives traces of light and matter.^*16 His commitment to precise printing nevertheless remained unchanged. Photography became a high-resolution surface for testing similarities among unlike things, rather than simply a medium for the faithful reproduction of reality.^*20

In a 1970 lecture, Sommer described how his musical scores developed from an interest in the location of events—“where” something happens—rather than only in “what” happens.^*18 Sommer’s words published in The Equivalent Tradition likewise show that he conceived of a photograph not merely as a single image fixed on a photosensitive support, but as a “surface” on which perception and association operate.^*24

Precision and Ambiguity

The Center for Creative Photography notes that Sommer was not widely known during his lifetime because his work repeatedly fell outside common expectations that documentary subjects or beautiful landscapes should occupy the center of photography.^*19 Today, however, SFMOMA, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, and other institutions collect and exhibit his still lifes of carcasses, horizonless landscapes, assemblages, and abstract camera-less images as a major body of work.^*20

Straight Photography

Historically, Sommer neither rejected Weston-like precision in order to move toward Surrealism nor simply “introduced” Surrealism into straight photography.^*4 He made maximum use of modern photography’s claim that sharp description guarantees the certainty of the real, then directed that power toward decay, waste, chance, and fragments. In doing so, he unsettled photographic culture’s judgments about what deserves to be treated as a valuable subject.^*3

Surrealism

Without claiming a simple direct lineage to later found imagery, appropriation, or camera-less photography, Sommer’s work showed early on that a single photographer could move between “photographing the world” and “constructing an image from fragments of the world.”^*17 The key to Sommer’s work is not a list of strange subjects, but a method of comparing unlike things with precision across media and searching for structural connections among them.^*18

Research by Ian Walker registered at the University of South Wales analyzes Arizona Landscapes through both Surrealism and representations of the desert, placing the extreme density of detail in historical context.^*25 MFAH’s Paracelsus, a camera-less image made from painted cellophane, shows that Sommer’s interest in material and precise printing continued even when he no longer photographed the external world through a lens.^*26

The Boundaries of Modernism

Research at Emory University discusses Sommer’s work from 1939 to 1962 in comparison with Weston, Adams, and Minor White, arguing that density, ambiguity, and complexity unsettled the norms of straight photography from within.^*27 The Philadelphia Museum of Art similarly describes his photographs as joining Surrealist thought, exceptional printing technique, and close attention to relationships among parts within the image.^*29 Sommer is better understood not as an eccentric figure at the margins of photographic history, but as an artist who destabilized modern photography’s association of clear, exact description with truth by pushing that clarity to an extreme. This position makes the critical force of the work easier to see. The “hyper-photographic detail and realism” noted in Princeton collection research captures this paradox well.^*30