Frederick Sommer 1905-1999

Gift of the photographer to Dr. Ernest Born, circa 1939

Estate of Ernest Born

Acquired by the present owners from the above

Other prints of this image:

Jonathan Williams, 'The Eyes of 3 Phantasts: Laughlin, Sommer, Bullock,' Aperture 9:3, 1961, p. 109

Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland: The New Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1979), p. 51

John Weiss, Editor, Venus, Jupiter & Mars: The Photographs of Frederick Sommer (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1980), pl. 19 and exhibition plate list, fig. 1

Mark Haworth-Booth, 'A Goldmine in Arizona,' Creative Camera, December 1981, p. 329

'Elected Affinities, The Frederick Sommer Exhibition,' Image, Volume 33, Nos. 3-4, 1990, p. 47, Fig. 18

Keith F. Davis, The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawings, Collage (Prescott and New Haven, 2005), p. 79

Weston Naef, Photographers of Genius at the Getty (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004), pl. 111

Aperture, No. 169, Winter 2002, p. 71

Frederick Sommer: The Box (Tucson and Munich, 1994), unpaginated

This is possibly the earliest print of this image.  Vintage prints of Amputated Foot are scarce.  Other prints are in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; Princeton University Art Museum; and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Like the photograph of duck entrails and chicken heads in Lot 137, the print offered here originally comes from the collection of Dr. Ernest Born.

In an interview with Michael Torosian in 1991, Sommer described how he acquired the subject of the present picture:

‘I was friendly with a doctor . . . who was himself a photographer . . . I showed him some of these chicken pictures.  He was delighted and said “When I have something really worth photographing, something unusual, I’ll bring it around.”  One night there was a knock at the door and he brought in a human leg that he had amputated just a half hour before.  Sometime a while after that he brought a placenta.  Those were about the best things. They were very complex shapes, very handsome shapes’ (quoted in Art of Frederick Sommer, p. 211).   April Watson relates that the amputated foot belonged to a drunken hobo who passed out riding the rails near Ashford, Arizona (ibid., p. 222). 

In 1961, this image was published in a controversial issue of Aperture (Volume 9, Number 3), in a portfolio of photographs edited and introduced by Jonathan Williams.  Entitled ‘The Eyes of 3 Phantasts,’ the portfolio reproduced images by Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer, and Wynn Bullock.  Contrasting Sommer’s quiet and refined life with his work, Williams wrote:

‘And yet, the photographs are “horrible”. . . . [Sommer] can ask a doctor friend what he’s carrying in the bloody newspaper, insist on taking the amputated foot (from a hobo’s accident on the Santa Fe tracks) back to the darkroom, and then produce a photograph . . . which is so accurate that it turns “the real” into a veritable jungle out of Hieronymous Bosch and Max Ernst.  The use of the eye, seeing Everything in the object, rejects the anticipated revulsion . . . I think Mr. Henry James has finally met his master—an objectivity of an order that seems almost galactic’ (p. 110). 

The article, and Sommer’s work in particular, provoked strong letters to the editor of the magazine, which were published in subsequent issues. 

Jaime Gipe describes how she and her husband came to own the print offered here, and those in Lots 137 and 139, as follows:

'During the late 1970s, Jon Gipe, a young Prescott photographer, met with Frederick Sommer on several occasions to show photographs and seek advice. Sommer gave Gipe three clues, the best advice he's ever received, “Leave Prescott, find a subject that matters to you and don’t limit yourself to photography -- study all the arts.” Around this same time Gipe’s father-in-law, Dr. Evaristo Martinez, a 3-D photography enthusiast, introduced Jon to his colleague and friend, Dr. Born. After the death of Ernest Born in 1980, Jon visited Mrs. Born to inquire about her husband's old camera equipment. She asked if he wanted to see her husband’s photographs and pulled a cardboard box from the closet, which contained numerous shots of flowers and trees by Born and, at the bottom, three distinctly different mounted prints with tissue folded over the images. Jon immediately recognized the work of Frederick Sommer. While Mrs. Born confirmed that Frederick Sommer had given these prints to her husband, she declared no desire to ever see them again and gave the photographs to Jon. Since then the prints have remained with the Gipe family.'