Frederick Sommer: A World of Bonds
‘The world is not a world of cleavages, the world is a world of bonds. Everything is shared by everything else; there are no discontinuities’ (FREDERICK SOMMER).
Finally, the book that Hazel Donkin and I have been working on since before Covid has been published. This is a study of the major American photographer Frederick Sommer, who worked in Arizona between the 1930s and his death in 1999. Sommer occupied a unique position in photography. Friend to Max Ernst and Edward Weston, his work has been discussed in accounts of both surrealism and American modernism without quite fitting in either context. His images are often startling and sometimes disturbing.
We were able to underpin our work with visits in 2024 to both the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson (which holds the Sommer Archive) and the Sommer Foundation in Prescott.
Hazel’s interest has mainly been in Sommer’s staged and manipulated work while I have written previously on his photographs of the Arizona desert. (That essay can be found elsewhere on this website, in the section ‘Surrealism in the Americas’.) For this book, we have brought together a series of case studies of individual photographs. These chapters build up a comprehensive analysis of Sommer’s photography, resulting in the most thorough book on his work since the large Yale monograph of 2005.
As a taster, here is a short section from the final chapter, an analysis of one of Sommer’s most mesmerizing pictures: Livia (1948). It is reproduced courtesy of the Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation.
