The Art of Photography : Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer and the Art of Photography

A Brief Discussion

(A rough draft)

Fred is best known as a photographer. Given the nature of those who collected his work, those photographers and artists he influenced and his sales, it is fair to say, albeit a cliché, he was the photographer’s photographer. Examples of his photographs can be found by going to Links and clicking on the any of the listed of sites. (Several times in the early 70’s he said to me that he sometimes wished that when people met him and asked “Are you Frederick Sommer the photographer?” he could say, “No.”)

Fred came to photography from architecture, drawing, painting, and with a staggering grasp of the history of art. These disciplines taught him about structure, position and occupier, linkages, technique and the continuum of the arts. In talking about what he brought to his art, I shouldn’t leave out his love of wit, ideas, philosophy, science, music, language, literature and food. These influenced his work, but they are less demonstrable in a written text: although they were quite obvious if you were with him.

His water colors, ca. 1931 - ca. 1937, show both a firm technical mastery and an inquisi-tive, eclectic sense of style and subject matter. His best known pencil drawings, those that were dated, come mostly from around 1959. Where, before 1930, his architectural render-ings, were precise and regular, his drawings were fluid and amorphous, although he often ended up with humanlike figures. His cut papers—photographs of large sheets of kraft paper that had been drawn on with a razor blade, and hung to allow the edges to fall for-ward or behind the plane of the sheet—show this fluidity and style.

He said that it took him years to unlearn the precision of his early renderings. To watch him draw a musical score, or make a cut paper, was not unlike watching films of Jackson Pollock paint (cut paper). He was totally absorbed. His hand and arm moved in large sweeps. Often, after only a few seconds, he looked as if he had been wrestling with his demons: his hair tousled and his face perspiring. When he was through, he seemed to collapse a little with exhaustion. Although this fluidity seems slapdash, again like Pollack, there was stunning balance and proportion.

He brought attitudes, skills and knowledge to his photography and to the sense of the photograph as art, which grew out of his experience in drawing and painting. When com-pared with other artists, and he would have been specific and said other photographers, he brought a more classical background that was too often missing in these others. (He often said that the only thing lower than a photographer was a cowboy. But living in Prescott where the real cowboy was disappearing and being replaced by the superficial image of a cowboy, his comment needs to be nuanced. It was the all too present imitation that of-fended him, and he felt the photography had almost as many imitators as the cowboys he saw in town.)

Elsewhere, music, I discuss what I call his visual acuity, with regard to his musi-cal scores. This is not just seeing patterns, linkages and balances, but his memory of im-ages. One can easily imagine the rhymes and echoes he saw as he set about to expose or create a negative.

He savored the preparation of exposing a negative. I am carefully avoiding saying “taking a picture,” because these are quite different. He said the time spent setting up and considering the scene was what was important, and not whether you had film in the camera. His unique ground-glass, with a hole drilled in the center so that one could focus on the aerial image, his tendency to vastly overexpose his negative—which, he said, grew out of his shooting without a light meter: it was always better to overexpose than under-expose—and, of course his work, belie some of the glibness of his comment. But its essence is towards the understanding of how images work, as opposed to the emotions gen-erated by the scene. We take snapshots based on emotion, a quick click to capture the moment. You set up a view camera to make an image. This is not, in any way to say that a quick picture cannot be every bit as good (e.g. Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment). But for Fred it was the entire experience of setting up, considering, playing with the composi-tion, and for that, mostly, he used a view camera. He did, however, use smaller formats, and he used them well.

To those people not familiar with his work, he made several types of cameraless negatives: paint on cellophane and smoke on glass. The former was a smear of paint, usually a brown paint, on a stretched piece of cellophane. Placed in an enlarger, the clear portions printed black and the painted portions in the grays and white (Paracelsus). Most were surprisingly small. Smoke on glass, cliché verre, was a more compli-cated process. A drawing was made on aluminum foil: a soft pencil, for example, would leave an impression in the foil (I do not remember if he coated the foil with something like petroleum jelly or not). The foil was sooted with a candle. A 4 X 5 inch glass plate was lightly coated with a thin film of something like petroleum jelly, and the foil was placed in contact with the prepared side of the glass: the soot pattern was then transferred to the glass. A second piece of glass was placed over the prepared side to protect it, and the two pieces taped together. (Fred used masking tape. In fact, going through his dark-room one found masking tape everywhere: on his smoke on glass plates, used to mask canvases when he tried to duplicate the effect of the modulated pencil line, to hold boxes or even broken stools together.) He also was not uncomfortable with working on the negative, for example, painting on a red dye to lighten areas or incising it with a knife to create black lines.

Another aspect of his work was the joy of the middle tones, from three-quarter through two-quarter. His paint on cellophane and smoke on glass images all explore the entire breadth of tone from black to white, but the rest—landscape, nudes, cut paper, assem-blage—thrive mostly in those middle tones, like a rich creamy chowder.

Subject matter is often what we are attracted to: a portrait of a child, the stark landscape of an Arizona hillside, the remarkable “lightshed” created by the opening paper petals of his cut paper. (This is a word Fred coined in the late 60’s - early 70’s to describe a physi-cal structure that as it recedes from a light source the light darkens—analogous to “water-shed”—something over which light spills and splits from light to dark.) But it could also be the discarded pieces of a chicken, the amputated foot of a hobo, or the desiccated bod-ies of coyotes butchered for a bounty—and many years later, the anatomical illustrations used in his collages. These are the occupiers, and the game for him was their position. “Who said art is about beauty?” he would say. It’s about so much more.

Watch a painter work. (For example: The Mystery of Picasso, 1956, made by filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot with cinematographer Claude Renoir, available on video and DVD. Clouzot filmed Picasso as he made approximately 20 images. Running time 77 minutes.) While working one part of the canvas, he will occasionally dab the edges, or elsewhere. He is adjusting the balances: the weights, linkages, fulcrums and edges as he goes. Every move begets a new world of choices. But the photograph develops in the darkroom, seemingly complete. The choice of paper and developer, dodging and burn-ing—lightening or darkening areas—and cropping have been historically the photogra-pher’s tools. An Arizona hillside might represent a luminance range of 10,000, film re-duces that to 200, and paper to 100. This is the tyranny of the photographic process. The process compresses, and one of the tasks of the photographer is to create the illusion that the image has not been compressed, to decompress it in a relative sense, to create verisi-militude.

Fred thought that making a good print begins outside the darkroom. As a good composer leads the ear through the texture of his music, a good print maker leads the eye. Most photographers used spotting dyes to remove the white spots caused by dust on the emul-sion, and bleach to remove black spots caused by tiny voids in the emulsion or to punch up the highlights. Fred used spotting dyes to add weight not just to those flaws, but sub-tly to tiny areas, often invisible without a magnifier, to correct balances and to lead the eye. He did the same with bleach to correct flaws and to lighten small areas. The advan-tage to working this way is that the print can be view under normal light to see how it works, and this spotting and bleaching adjusts areas too small or too complex to be dealt with just by dodging and burning.

Studies done in the 1980’s showed the movement of the pupil of the eye when people were told to look at an image. Even though instructed to “stare,” the graph of their eye movement looked like the scribbling of a child. Advertisers took note, because if the eye never lands on their logo, if the eye falls away from the image, an expensive print ad was less than effective. But so too in all images. The question is, “How to keep the eye not just on the image, but on the important parts of the image?”

One of Fred’s “tricks,” when looking at an prints was to try to identify an offending area of an image—too light or too dark—where the eye kept be drawn to, and therefore away from what is important or preventing you from seeing the image as a whole. To test his theory, he would place his fingers or hand over that section, blocking it, to see if either the image settles a little, or when he pulled his hand away, to see if the eye is drawn again to that spot. It easily “proves” if that area is truly too dark or too light.

At a gross level, the frame achieves some of that. Some photographers print a pencil line around their images; some burn down the edges of the print; some over-mat so that the edge of the window laps into the image. Not that these are ineffective or inappropriate, but for Fred they were crude. Particularly bothersome to him was the practice of making the window in the over-mat smaller than the image. Because he felt that, with obvious exceptions, the edges of an image were the most sensitive and alive. Covering them smothered them.

Some years ago, Luiz Carlos Felizardo, a very good Brazilian photographer, was visiting. He wanted to show Fred a print of his, but he wanted to over-mat it first. He gave me the dimensions to cut it. The edge of the window lapped each side of the print by just slightly more than one millimeter. I told Luiz that Fred wouldn’t like this; he would lift the window and say that the edges had been lost. After Luiz had shown Fred the print, I asked him what Fred thought. He imitated Fred lifting the over-mat.

At shows, Fred easily accepted bad images, but an image that he thought could have been great, but that wasn’t because it seemed as if the artist quit too soon, infuriated him. For him the artist had cheated.

Certainly, not all images have obvious sources or antecedents. In general, however, all images do. Each image is part of a continuum from the cave drawings in France, tens of thousands of years ago, to the images seen yesterday. Fred was always dismayed that people came to the arts too often with little knowledge of the history of art. He believed that we all borrow, and we should know that we are and know how to embrace that and use that to ones advantage. To be a “thief greater than his loot.”

There are a few qualities of images that he was wary of. These are things that can override design or composition, tricking us into thinking an image is better than it is.

Contrast: The eye is attracted to contrast: building contrast in an image tends to build in-terest and drama. Fred often talked about a show he had with Ansel Adams at The Ari-zona Bank Galleria, in Phoenix, 1977. His work was on one side of the room and Ad-ams’s was on the other. He said that he watched people come in and simply walk to-wards Adam’s side, look at the work, like moths drawn to a flame, then leave. This didn’t have to do with popularity, but with how the eye is engaged.

Scale: The size of an image can draw us. Fred felt that there was often an ideal size for an image. He was not necessarily referring to increased grain of over enlarging a nega-tive, or the choking up of shadow areas that could open if printed larger. While the mar-ket for photographic prints almost universally recognizes a significantly higher price for larger prints of a given image, it is much harder to print that same image smaller. The eye takes in more of an image the smaller it is so that imbalances are more obvious. In a larger print of the same image, not only doesn’t the eye take in as much, but the distances between pivot points, areas of mass, etc. are greater, so less obvious or less effecting. (In writing, sometimes there are two scenes or elements within a scene that are sequential, and which need to be and are true to the story, but which when simply placed one after the other distort some other aspect: pacing, creating a kind of foreshadowing, placing too much emphasis on something that doesn’t need it, etc. Putting something in between—description, narrative, dialogue, reverie—creates distance and weakens the undesirable effect.)

As a practical matter, too small an image and people cannot see it easily; too large an image and many of its nuances are lost.

Color: Some colors are simply spectacular, and we respond to them viscerally. Color can be quite seductive. Stunning color can overpower composition and design.

Subject matter: Subject matter is often evocative. A beautiful woman, a young child, a dazzling sunset, all carry the advantage that they can evoke emotions and responses be-yond their extrinsic compositional characteristics.

None of this is to say that large, dramatic, colorful images cannot be every bit as good as small, subtle monochromatic images, or better. Rather it is to say that Fred recognized the power of these qualities to overwhelm and seduce and felt a particular need to intro-duce them with care.

If much of this sounds too subtle or fussy, consider a Bach Violin Partita, for example. Any violin student enrolled in Julliard or Eastman can play it flawlessly. What distin-guishes their playing from that of Heiffetz or Stern? Aside from luck, showmanship, and charisma, it’s nuance. As listeners we may not be able to say what it is, but we respond to the effect. When people asked Fred about whether he really believed the average per-son was aware of position and occupiers, linkages, balance, he said that you merely needed to watch someone walk into a room with a picture that is not square, and they’ll try to straighten it.

All of this, in a sense, falls under what he would call the fundamentals. Although he loved chance, and felt that chance was a key ingredient to art knowledge of the funda-mentals and one’s technical skills need to be there to take advantage chances offerings. (In working on a print there is lots of chance. Sometimes when bleaching or spotting a print, there are areas that seem harder, less able to accept either the bleach or the dyes, and sometimes there are softer areas, that overreact. I presume these are due to slight variations in the gelatin. But when something happens unexpectedly, going lighter than you wanted, for example, you can start over, or accept that chance has entered into the process.)

Fred’s skip reading—he would let his eye drift across a page of text and pick words out, reading as if in one continuous sentence—and his musical scores perhaps best exemplify his love of cross pollination, the interdisciplinary. He felt that this was vital to art, curios-ity, cooking and life. To allow what you see and feel and know of one thing to blend into another, and to accept where that leads, was, after Frances, his wife, the joy of life.

Ironically, when he taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago, 1957, while the students loved him, most of the faculty did not. He was accused of trying to create clones of himself. Fred did not like repetition. He did not like to reprint images unless he could make them different or better. He considered repetition propaganda. And he certainly did not want his students making images like his. But what he would have insisted on is knowing the fundamentals, to do no less well than you can, to serve the problem. Powerful advice that reflects the way he affected photography and many of the people who knew him.