Frederick Sommer

By descent to the present owner

This early print of Frederick Sommer’s ‘Negative #68,’ as well as the photograph in Lot 132, comes originally from the collection of fellow Prescott, Arizona, resident, Charles Tracy (1881-1955), and has remained in the family since. A passionate proponent of Surrealism in America, Tracy was a painter, cartoonist, playwright, and poet. Sommer and Tracy both participated in a 1936 exhibition at the Monday Club in Prescott and remained friends for many years. Tracy dedicated his 1939 book, An American Sur-Realist, to his wife Florence and to Sommer.

In December 1937, Sommer purchased an 8-by-10-inch format Century Universal View camera and a Zeiss Tessar lens, which gave him the ability to photograph objects in extreme close-up and in extraordinary detail. During a visit from Edward Weston (see Lots 60, 61, 63, 72, 74, 76, 88, 122, 123, and 124) the following month, Sommer produced his first large-format negatives. The acquisition of this new equipment eventually led to the surrealist still life studies that would become a significant component of Sommer’s oeuvre. 

At once haunting and sublime, his photographs of mundane and gruesome found objects display an arresting visual potency in their unremitting intensity, sharpness of detail, and calculated compositions. Some of the earliest photographs in this vein include Sommer’s unprecedented images of chicken parts carefully arranged against a white backdrop. It was during a visit to the butcher counter at the local Piggly Wiggly with his wife Frances that Sommer first saw dismembered chickens, along with their discarded innards, as potential subject matter. He was immediately entranced by the poultry scraps, and the couple went home with more than just the meat that they would cook for dinner that night.  

'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' (Frederick Sommer, 1976 interview, quoted in Cynthia Wayne, Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations: Photomontage in America, p. 60)

Starting in 1938, Sommer worked intensively with chicken parts for two years. He began numbering his large-format negatives at this time, eventually reaching 100 before abandoning the practice. Subsequently, he discarded many of these negatives. The few that survive include #7, #30, #67, #68, and #76 (Keith Davis, The Art of Frederick Sommer, p. 222). The present photograph bears the negative number (‘68’) on the reverse of the mount. As of this writing, only two other prints of ‘Negative #68’ have come to auction.