Photographer Frederick Sommer

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now showing the work of photographer/artist Frederick Sommer, in a show titled, “Frederick Sommer Photographs”. From the show description:

Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a

Max Ernst, 1946 © Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation

horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock.

Some of Sommer’s techniques may seem old hat by now, double exposures, etc. but Sommer was one of the first to explore photography as an artistic medium, and is generally considered one of the “masters of photography”. Using large format cameras and unconventional methods, Sommer made influential works that are still interesting today.

Availability

• “The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage” is available at Amazon

Additional Resources

• The Frederick Sommer Foundation
• Learn more about Sommer at the Getty’s website

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