Stieglitz Gallery, ground floor
Main Building
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. The first exhibition of Sommer's work in Philadelphia since 1968, Frederick Sommer Photographs presents some forty images spanning the artist's career, along with a small number of drawings and collages. Included is a rare suite of macabre yet poignant photographs the artist made in 1939 using chicken parts collected from his local butcher.