Frederick Sommer 1905-1999

Gift of the photographer to Dr. Ernest Born, circa 1938

Estate of Dr. Ernest Born

Acquired by the present owners from the above

Another print of this image:

Cynthia Wayne, Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations: Photomontage in America (The Art Gallery, University of Maryland at College Park, 1991), p. 63

At this writing, only two other vintage prints of this image have been located, in the Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,and in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The photograph in this and the following two lots come originally from the collection of Dr. Ernest Born, Frederick Sommer’s friend and  physician in Prescott, Arizona, from 1935 to 1980.   An amateur photographer, Dr. Born was also a friend and colleague of Dr. Evaristo Martinez, a 3-D photography enthusiast and the father of Jaime Martinez Gipe, one of the present owners of the print offered here.  It was Dr. Martinez who introduced Jaime Gipe and her husband, the photographer Jon Gipe, to Dr. Born.  For more information, see Lot 138. 

In December 1937, Sommer bought an 8x10 Century Universal View camera and a Zeiss Tassar close-up lens, equipment that permitted the rendering of whatever he photographed in sharp-focus detail.  During a visit from Edward and Charis Weston the following month, Sommer spent time with Weston photographing in the area and produced his first large-format negatives.

In 1938, Sommer began to use the camera to photograph non-traditional still life subjects, such as discarded animal organs and carcasses, and found objects.  The choice of subject matter for this and other similar images appears to have been unplanned, particularly in the case of the chicken and duck parts.  One day while grocery shopping with his wife, Sommer decided to take not only the chicken he requested from the butcher at the local Piggly Wiggly, but also the innards that were typically discarded.  This became Sommer's routine for almost two years.  During an interview with Jim Macquaid in 1976, he said,

'The difference between chicken heads, my God.  It's just like we learn to see people . . . the last thing in the world you'd think would be that chickens could be so different . . . so this material was simply available; and there was a great deal of variety in it.  And that was what was fascinating' (Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations, p. 61).

Sommer also began numbering his large-format negatives at this time, eventually reaching 100 and then abandoning the practice.  Subsequently, he discarded many of these negatives.  According to April Watson, who wrote the chronology for The Art of Frederick Sommer, very few negatives survive.  These include #7, #30, #67, #68, and #76.  Twenty-two have been identified with the help of numbered prints (The Art of Frederick Sommer, pp. 210-11and 222).

The photograph in this and the following two lots, Amputated Foot (1939) and Placenta (1940), remained with the Born family until after his death in December of 1980.