FREDERICK SOMMER | ARIZONA LANDSCAPE

Weston Gallery, Carmel, 1978

By descent to the present owner

John Weiss, ed., Venus, Jupiter and Mars: The Photographs of Frederick Sommer (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1980), pl. 5

John Weiss, ed., Exhibition Checklist, A Supplement to Venus, Jupiter & Mars: The Photographs of Frederick Sommer (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1980), fig. 21

Sommer: Images (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1984), pl. 29

Keith F. Davis, The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage (Prescott and New Haven, 2005), p. 69

‘[Sommer’s Arizona landscapes] are remarkably radical in formal terms. Sommer eliminated the horizon line and filled his frame with meticulously detailed vistas of rock and cacti. The even, overall structure of these photographs creates a strange pictorial duality, at once static and agitated [. . .] These photographs convey an air of eternity: individual things may change, but the forces at work are timeless. Vistas of rock and cacti become as sublime as the starry night sky’ (Keith Davis, The Art of Frederick Sommer, pp. 18-9).

The Frederick Sommer Foundation estimates that no more than 5 early examples of this image exist. As of this writing, it is believed that no other early print of Arizona Landscape, 1945, has come to auction.