Frederick Sommer in Context

In 1949, at the suggestion of gallery owner Charles Egan, the photographer Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) went to Prescott to visit Sommer. He stayed for three months, which marked the beginning of decades of friendship. During Siskind’s visit, the two men saw each other daily, shared Sommer’s darkroom, and went on several photographing expeditions, including one to the ghost town of Jerome, Arizona, where Sommer had also taken Weston a decade earlier. At the time of this trip, Siskind was undergoing a profound change in his artistic life. He had been a member of the socially concerned New York Photo League for over ten years, but in 1944, he started to shift his photography toward greater abstraction. Between 1947 and 1951, four exhibitions of his work at the Egan Gallery established his reputation as the photographer most closely associated with the abstract expressionist movement.^[1]

During their outing to Jerome, Siskind created one of his most iconic images, while Sommer did not bring his camera at all. Instead, he found old X-rays at the abandoned hospital and joked that his negatives had already been developed for him. Sommer’s Found Negative may have been printed using one of those X-rays.^[2]

Though the images speak to Siskind’s and Sommer’s shared interests in photographic abstraction, the story of their creation reveals an important difference in the artists’ attitudes. While Siskind sought out the perfect detail to capture in his environment, Sommer favored free-wheeling experimentation and a more leisurely approach. For Sommer, moreover, the visual sensibility he shared with Siskind could be expressed in a variety of ways, such as the abstract Drawing, or a photographed assemblage like Venus, Jupiter and Mars.