Frederick Sommer
				American, 1905-1999
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Sommer may fairly be said to represent the ideal of the photographer's photographer. Neither as well known as many of the other acknowledged masters of art photography, nor as prolific, Sommer is nonetheless considered one of the very great living photographers [article written in 1986]. Working throughout the entire spectrum of photography, with an authentically surrealist sensibility, Sommer has produced a body of work which is as disturbing as it is exquisite. Typically, his photographs require long periods of preparation, nowhere more so than in his manufactured objects and collages which he then photographs. It was not until 1956 that his first major portfolio of photographs was published, and six vears later that the first monograph on his work appeared. Born in Angri, Italy, Frederick Sommer lived from 1913 to 1930 with his family in Brazil, where he returned to practice as a landscape architect and city planner after receiving an M.A. in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University in 1927. Sommer contracted tuberculosis and was forced to abandon his career, but his interest in art, philosophy, and aesthetics blossomed during his convalescence in the American Southwest, which became his permanent home. Continuing to paint and draw, Sommer began to photograph seriously soon after a series of meetings with Alfred Stieglitz in 1935. Influential, too, was his exposure to the work of Paul Strand and Edward Weston during the same period. His earliest photographs were taken in Arizona, where he had settled with his wife Frances in 1930. They include some of his most famous photographs: unsettling studies of animal entrails and dried carcasses, and startling images of the desert landscape with suppressed horizons and confusing spatial configurations. In the early 1940s, Sommer met two artists who were also to influence his work, the Precisionist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, and even more importantly, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst. Both men encouraged Sommer's interest in exploring the shared problems of different media. Sommer would later say, "It is with the sensitized surface rather than with photography itself, that I am concerned." Consistent with such a notion has been Sommer's experimental and systematic exploration of a range of photographic practices: cameraless negatives, clichés-verre, smoke-on-glass, paint-on-cellophane, cut-paper images, and - outside of the range of photography altogether - musical notation as art. Sommer's first one-man show of photographs was held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, in 1946. This was followed by a larger exhibit, one of the series Diogenes with a Camera, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1952. Throughout the last three decades, Sommer has traveled widely and taught photography at many institutions including Prescott College, Arizona; the San Francisco Art Institute; Princeton University; and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1974 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also written a number of suggestive papers on aesthetics and pictorial logic. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona established an extensive archive of Sommer's work in 1975 and a major retrospective was held at the International Center of Photography in 1981.