Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
If I could find them [assemblages] in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can’t be found.
The world of art and the world of science are interested in evidence and verification.
Life is the most durable fiction that matter has yet come up with and art is the structure of matter as life’s most durable fiction.
The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.
I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic.
The first two or three years of my photographic work were very intense in terms of chicken anatomy.
The sensitized surface has an honesty, an inevitableness... It just can’t do anything else. It shows you the process itself.
There isn’t a lot that can be done about taking a good photograph... You have to accept an involved set of circumstances. And this involved set of circumstances is extraordinary and great for the simple reason that you don’t understand it.
