FREDERICK SOMMER
American
Viewing photography as a means to extend a mental
image, Frederick Sommer saw art as an intellectual
production and not merely object creation. To Som-
mer, art was the process of making a photograph by
assembling things in a certain order to construct a
new thing. He did not see photography as a way to
capture a bit of reality, which separated him from
many of his contemporaries, who dismissed his
work as unphotographic. Sommer’s preference for
surrealist compositions and abstract images rele-
gated him to obscurity for most of his long career.
Born Fritz Sommer in 1905 in Angri, Italy to a
German father and Swiss mother, Sommer moved
with his family frequently throughout Germany
and Switzerland because of his father’s occupation
as a horticulturist. In 1913, the family moved to
Sa ̃o Paulo, Brazil to enjoy the warm climate and
luxurious tropical plants. The move permitted
Sommers to escape Europe just before the devasta-
tion of World War I. Three years later, the family
relocated to Rio de Janeiro, where Carlos Sommer
established a flourishing landscape architecture
firm and nursery. Sommer, heavily influenced by
his father’s enthusiasm for the structural aesthetics
of the natural landscape, began to assist Carlos
with architectural drawings at age of 11. In 1922,
the child prodigy bought a folding Kodak camera
to make photographs for architectural study. In the
following year, he began accepting commissions as
a landscape architect.
Sommer’s growing reputation as a landscape
architect led him to the United States, where he
became an assistant to E. Gorton Davis, head of
the Landscape Architecture Department at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York. Sommer received a
Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture from
Cornell in 1927 without ever having earned a
Bachelor’s Degree. He returned to Rio, with his
new wife Frances, and formed a business partner-
ship with his father.
Sommer appeared set on a life as an avant-garde
architect until tuberculosis struck him in 1930. While
recuperating in Europe, he studied philosophy and
art, including the works of the Cubists and the Fu-
turists. Sommer now began to consider photography
for its own sake. He purchased two cameras, a 2¼
3¼ Plaubel Makima and a folding Zeiss Ikon, in the
same format. After a friend showed him how to
develop photographs, Sommer made contact prints
on gold-toned printing out paper.
Having regained his strength by 1931, Sommer
and his wife decided to settle in the more healthful
climate of Arizona. The desert had a haunting
beauty that Sommer appreciated, but the small
city of Tucson offered few opportunities for an
innovative landscape architect. Sommer therefore
decided to pursue art as a vocation, painting in a
geometric, architectonic style. He picked up cash by
teaching watercolor, drawing, and design in a small
studio that he operated with painter Lucy Marlow.
Sommer did not fully embrace photography
until influenced by famed photographer Alfred
Steiglitz. Sommer had sent his watercolors to Stei-
glitz in 1935 and, following a meeting with the
older man, began to see photography as an art
form. He resolved to explore photography but
also began to receive recognition for his drawings
and watercolors.
Throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, Sommer
continued to make paintings and photographs that
are largely independent of one another. His paint-
ings are abstract, structural studies, while his
photographs focus on the concrete and specific.
The earliest Sommer photographs, made with an
8 10-inch Century Universal view camera and a
210-mm Zeiss Tessar lens, are still-life close-ups of
organic discards, animal carcasses, and entrails
that he encountered near Prescott, Arizona.
It is Sommer’s choice of often repulsive subject
matter that brought controversy to his career and
prevented him from gaining recognition for most of
his life.Amputated Foot(1939) particularly offended
critics, notably Ansel Adams. A black-and-white
photograph, it shows an actual human amputated
lower leg and foot that Sommer received from a
surgeon friend.Horse(1945) depicts the carcass of a
horse that appears to be smashed into the earth while
the camera lens depicts, with foreground emphasis,
the frontal pair of legs as astonishingly fully shaped,
outlined effectively by deep, black shadow. The use
of a short lens in combination with a close-up van-
tage point accounts for much of the image’s impact.SOMMER, FREDERICK