Frederick Sommer

mounted, titled and numbered '#50' by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, 1938 

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

Estate of Dr. Ernest Born, 1980

Collection of Jaime and Jon Gipe, Arizona

Sotheby's New York, 11 October 2005, Sale 8115, Lot 137

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

This scarce early print, on paper with a slight surface sheen and mounted on slick pale gray board, is in generally very good to excellent condition. There are two tiny chips at the edge at the lower right. When examined in high raking light, very faint, light scratches and indentations are visible randomly on the surface of the print. The top corners of the mount are bumped, with loss of the gray surface at the left corner, and the left corner is creased. There are three abrasions across the top edge of the front of the mount, and a 3 1/2-inch strip of abrasion on the reverse of the mount. None of these issues detracts from the otherwise very attractive appearance of this rare vintage print.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

This photograph comes originally from the collection of Dr. Ernest Born, Frederick Sommer’s long-time friend and physician in Prescott, Arizona.  An amateur photographer, Dr. Born once promised Sommer that ‘When I have something really worth photographing, something unusual, I’ll bring it around’ (quoted in The Art of Frederick Sommer, p. 211).  Born later brought Sommer a severed foot and a human placenta that are the subjects of two of the photographer’s most famous images, each taken, like the present image, with an 8-by-10 Century View camera and Zeiss Tessar lens that rendered every detail in exceptional, hallucinatory fashion.      

‘Duck Entrails, Chicken Heads’ is among a number of startling still life arrangements that Sommer began to compose and photograph in 1938, using carcasses, organs, and other innards thrown away by his neighborhood butcher.  ‘The difference between chicken heads, my God,’ Sommer once commented. ‘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 . . . [but] there was a great deal of variety in it.  And that was what was fascinating' (quoted in Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations, p. 61).

These still life studies confirm Sommer as an inadvertent Surrealist, one whose combinations of unlikely objects created new realities.  As Cynthia Wayne has observed, Man Ray and Max Ernst were struck by the ‘mythic qualities’ of Sommer’s imagery.  ‘If I could find them in nature,’ Sommer wrote of his arrangements, ‘I would photograph them.  I make them because through photography I have knowledge of things that can’t be found’ (ibid., p. 63).     

The photograph offered here, along with early prints of the severed foot and the placenta, were given by Born’s widow to a young Prescott photographer, Jon Gipe, after the doctor’s death in 1980.  Gipe had met Sommer some years before, and he recognized the photographs’ importance.  The advice Sommer gave him, as Gipe remembered, was among the best he’d ever received: ‘Leave Prescott, find a subject that matters to you, and don’t limit yourself to photography—study all the arts.’

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