I was recently interviewed for the SPGA Seattle Graphic Artists Guild newsletter (link here) where I made mention of one of my influences, Frederick Sommer. This initiated an email exchange with the Frederick Sommer Foundation for recollections of this artist and philosopher, who died in 1999.
In 1977 I was in a workshop taught by Sommer at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. I was an impressionable 21 year old, immature for my age, (though maybe impressionable and immature are redundant adjectives to describe a 21 year old male), and much of Sommer’s philosophizing in our small group went over my head. But something stuck. And I think it has affected the way I have made photographs for the subsequent 28 years.
Sommer is a difficult figure to understand, both photographically and philosophically. His work is dense and coolly formal, yet rich with a subversive, psychological depth. The surrealists claimed him as one of their own. I’ve heard him described as the anti-Weston, his still lifes the antithesis of Edward Weston’s formal sensuality, yet I look at Sommer’s cut paper abstractions as among the most beautiful and sensual photographs ever made.
At his workshop I bought a copy of "The Poetic Logic of Art and Aesthetics," which I still have. For years I would ponder the nearly impenetrable philosophical poetry that makes up his writing, milking what meaning I could to illuminate my own approach to photography. An example:
"Position is the prime element of form and from position
are derived all aspects of structure and form.
"Elegance of form is the product of elegance of choice
within specific limitations.
"Quantitative and qualitative choice of positions in space
and choice of occupiers for those positions
define the logic of form…
"In a generalized condition of space,
the sum of all occupiable positions
is the potential for creation."
It is highly distilled drink, this material. Every word is so densely packed with meaning, you feel you should just sip a few lines, then put the book back on the shelf for a year.
What sense do I make from these words, nearly 30 years later? It matches my formalist sensibilities of the medium, and I don’t doubt that something from that encounter with Sommer made it into my dense head. I take these words to mean that every element in the frame, and its position and tonality, have meaning by their very presence in the frame. You must ignore nothing. That excruciatingly subtle adjustments make a difference. I remember a printing workshop with Sommer’s assistant where we spent hours making minute adjustments to a single image of ours. Never had I had such scrutiny while making a print.
Here is a website to learn more about Frederick Sommer: www.fredericksommer.org. The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage is due out from Yale University Press in May 2005.
(Photos at top by Doug Plummer, photographed at Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho, in 1977)
(Cut Paper photo courtesy of the Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation)
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