Photography Exhibition: Philadelphia Museum of Art - Frederick Sommer Photographs

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has become one of the foremost exhibitors of fine art photography in the nation. Frederick Sommer Photographs is a wonderful exhibition worthy of this great institution.

This exhibition will run through January 3, 2010

Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock.

This exhibition is the first of Sommer’s work in Philadelphia since 1968, and includes 40 images.
If you’re in the Philadelphia area through early January, I strongly suggest you take in this terrific exhibition.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.