Biography provided by Focal press
 
Known for his black and white contact prints of exceptional tonal beauty and his probing philosophical approach, he explored a wide range of visual expressions that merged painting, drawing, music, and the photographic image. Influenced by Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Weston, he began making photographs in 1935. His idiosyncratic choices of still life objects steeped in putrescence have a formal elegance, their structure and associations laden with psychological depth. His photographs of cut paper constructions, assemblages and lensless images of smoke on glass are a fantastical counterpoint to his horizon-less depictions of the southwest landscape. Sommer worked in relative isolation in Arizona for more than fifty years, his prominence coming late in his career.
 
(Author: GW)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Approved biography
Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK)
 
Frederick Sommer's photographs marry a surrealist imagination with brilliant photographic technique: the airless Arizona Landscapes are his most famous and personal creation. Devoid of markers of scale or distance, these panoramic views seem like endless expanses of space, immeasurable and sublime. In 1939 he created a series of grotesque still-lifes, depicting the heads and entrails of chickens with perfect precision. Sommer's images are often akin to surrealist paintings, mysterious, tense or foreboding in mood, and suggesting as he said, that "something metaphysical is happening".
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
 
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