When I first met Fred, he insisted that I call him Fred. I was eighteen, and he was the first adult who had ever said that to me. Although his art and speech were compelling and demanding, giving to him a patina of formality and awesomeness, as a person, he was Fred. I am keenly aware that by calling him by his first name I might seem pretentious or boastful, but I can’t imagine calling anything else.

In 1995-96, when Fred and I were working on transcribing, editing and organizing what became eight little booklets, of which he was very proud--giving away sets almost as fast as I could get them together--he said that this should be his official biography. It lists the things that he was most proud, but a lot more could be said about him and his work.

"Difficult, obscure, reclusive, arrogant, and hard to get along with," that was how Fred said the outside world viewed him, back in the 1960s.* Perhaps simply for living in the hills around Prescott, Arizona, and not New York or Los Angeles. Perhaps because throughout his life, it was his curiosity that seemed to guide him more than the marketplace. He was none of that, although he had his moments, which were mostly over art. He would get angry when he saw an image that missed being good, and when it seemed to him that the artist had the skill and sense to have gotten there but just didn't. If he was difficult and arrogant it was usually over his own work. He was a ruthless editor, and often tore up prints that, although they had gotten as far as being trimmed and dry mounted, he felt were a little off.

He often said that a good print is made outside the darkroom. He approached the photographic print as a painter would a canvas. The nuances of balance and what could be called eye leading, were his most singular contributions to the craft of photography. Through spotting, to add weight to very small areas with dyes, and reducing, to remove weight from areas with bleach, he gave the photographer the means to escape the tyranny of lens, film and paper. Dodging and burning were strategic, reducing and spotting were tactical. Rather than simply burning the edges of an image or making a pencil line border, he demonstrated how a more painterly technique was possible.

But most importantly, his vision was eclectic, best exemplified by his skip reading and his musical scores. He loved to cook, and anyone who had dinner with him will remember his meals and his excitement. His senses seemed to mix, in a kind of synesthesia, where he could compare a varying mix of black bean soup with stewed tomatoes to de Beers formula (for producing varying degrees of hardness or softness in a print); where the linkages between visual elements were like the admixture of ingredients in a meal. And always the admonition to do no less well than you can.

This is not to "do the best that you can," rather it urges you to reset the bar each time you do something and to exceed that the next.

Perhaps he was difficult.

If you have questions, corrections, comments or stories about Fred, please click here Sommer.

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