Frederick Sommer |
| Posted 2009-07-18 by Judy Wight Branson |
| Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania Sunday, January 31, 1999 FREDERICK SOMMER RESPECTED PHOTOGRAPHER, ACTOR Artist Frederick Sommer died Jan. 23 at his home in Prescott, Ariz. The widely respected photographer and writer was 93. Mr. Sommer, who had lived in Arizona since 1931, was little known in his home state but influential elsewhere, from Europe to Japan. He was the author of books and articles and the subject of even more of them. "Arizona lost a hidden treasure," said Phoenix Art Museum Director James Ballinger. "Sommer's photographs have been loved and respected by artists, collectors and museums internationally for three or four decades." His photographs are in the permanent collections of institutions that include the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Museum of Photography, the Getty Museum, the George Eastman House and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. He had his first show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1952. His work was the focus of another show, "The Mistress of This World Has No Name," that visited the Phoenix Art Museum in 1988. A retrospective show was mounted at the Getty Museum in 1994. Of that show, Getty Curator Weston Naef wrote, "Sommer's style developed in a near vacuum, but it was guided by some classic rules of art - severity, logic, balance - which he applied to his photography." His photographic archives will be placed at the Center for Creative Photography; his library will go to the Getty. He was given Arizona's Governor's Art Award in 1987. He lived with his wife, Frances, in a small, wooden bungalow in the pines a mile or so from downtown Prescott and continued to create art until age slowed him down about six months ago. "He declined very slowly and very elegantly," said Naomi Lyons, who had been Mr. Sommer's assistant since 1985. "It's really only in the past 10 days that he had trouble communicating, and in the last week that he stopped eating and drinking." Born in Italy in 1905, he grew up in Brazil. In 1925, he came to the United States, where he earned a degree in landscape architecture from Cornell University. He moved to Arizona to recuperate from tuberculosis and, in the early 1930s, decided to take up photography. The photographs he made were daring and experimental. He went against the grain of making pictures of beautiful scenes or items. He photographed glistening chicken entrails, dead animals turned into road leather, and saguaro-filled Arizona landscapes. They do not show the glorious West of Ansel Adams, but the dusty interminable desert that we all try to avoid with our air conditioning and golf courses. His photographs and drawings display a wide range of approaches, from realistic to completely abstract, but all the styles share one basic quality: They made you take notice and wonder. In the 1950s, he experimented with cameraless photography, creating his own negatives on glass with candle soot, and printing them out normally. Most recently, he had been cutting up and rearranging medical drawings from Victorian books, inventing new and infinitely odd physiologies. Mr. Sommer was often called a Surrealist, but unlike most artists so categorized, he was less interested in the Freudian subconscious and more in the rational, organizing capacity of the human brain. His reliance on chance in his art, and his friendship with the late surrealist painter, Max Ernst, who at one time lived in Sedona, Ariz., probably have been responsible for Mr. Sommer being labeled a surrealist; but Mr. Sommer shows little interest in merely shocking his public. He was more interested in following his logic to its end. His work, more than anything else, hinges on the way the human mind creates order from its perceptions. "Throw three pebbles on the ground," he once said, "and the human mind will discover an order in the pattern they create." That order, he believed, was art. His career is summed up in 1984 in the International Center of Photography's Encyclopedia of Photography: "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 photography, nor as prolific, Sommer is nonetheless considered one of the very great living photographers." |
Note: These obituaries are transcribed as published and are submitted by volunteers who have no connection to the families. They do not write the obituaries and have no further information other than what is posted within the obituaries. We do not do personal research. For this you would have to find a volunteer who does this or hire a professional researcher.
Questions About This Project?