Frederick Sommer Quotes

#1. I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic.

Frederick Sommer

#2. Words represent images: nothing can be said for which there is no image.

Frederick Sommer

#3. The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated

Frederick Sommer

#4. Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

Frederick Sommer

#5. Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition.

Frederick Sommer

#6. Art and accident are one.

Frederick Sommer

#7. Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.

Frederick Sommer

#8. Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions.

Frederick Sommer

#9. The only way to understand something is to be confronted by something that is difficult to understand.

Frederick Sommer

#10. The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine its possible relatedness to other things.

Frederick Sommer

#11. Choice and chance structure art and nature.

Frederick Sommer

#12. Art accepts what it finds.

Frederick Sommer

#13. Art is images you carry. You cannot carry nature with you, but you carry images of nature. When you go out to make a picture you find you are moved by something which is in agreement with an image you already held within yourself.

Frederick Sommer

#14. We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted.

Frederick Sommer

#15. Reality is greater than our dreams.

Frederick Sommer

#16. If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found.

Frederick Sommer

#17. Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been?

Frederick Sommer

#18. Everything is shared by everything else; there are no discontinuities.

Frederick Sommer

#19. My photographs are not pure: they are a seething wealth of imperfection.

Frederick Sommer

#20. Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.

Frederick Sommer

#21. In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.

Frederick Sommer

#22. The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.

Frederick Sommer

#23. Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.

Frederick Sommer

#24. Art is the splendor of reality before everything has become meaning.

Frederick Sommer

#25. The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation.

Frederick Sommer