"Noted Photo Artist Visits in Aledo After
10-Day Lecture Series in Chicago"
The Times Record, Aledo, Illinois
December 24, 1952

(Sommer had nothing to do with the Viola nurse article but what a coincidence)

Current Events - updated January 6, 2012

Here we try to keep up on happenings related to
Frederick Sommer (b. September 7, 1905 – d. January 23, 1999). Auction offerings and results we are informed of, exhibits and more if possible. Additional information is posted as it becomes available.

Click for info about the development of a catalogue raisonne The Exhibition Archive has a list of past and recent shows.

Current & Upcoming exhibits - (sorted by closing date)

Tate, Britain
January 13, 2012
Symposium "Landscape and Eschatology" with a presentation by John Timberlake on Frederick Sommer.

Closing soon

Museum of Modern Art, NYC
May 13, 2011 - February 2012
Includes Sommer's "Smoke on Cellophane 5, 1961" as part of the current photography exhibit.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
"Modernist Photography: 1910 - 1950"
July 30, 2011 - April 1, 2012
Includes Sommer, Sheeler, Weston, Siskind, Levitt.
Two reviews are posted at MFA, Boston's site.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London This is a pretty nice webpage about Frederick Sommer.

The best books readily available on Sommer:

Callahan, Siskind, Sommer - At the Crossroads of American Photography by Britt Salvesen and Keith F. Davis (2009)
Radius Press Book description
This is a great look at the three artists in parallel along with excellent essays from Keith and Britt - Jeremy Cox

The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage

This book is widely available with several reviews since the release in May 2005. Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London (ISBN 0-300-10783-8), for the Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation.

Recognition for the book included an Independent Publishers Winner of the Fine Art category, 2005;
ARLIS Wittenborn Memorial Book Awards
Recognized for Excellence in Art Publication; and a Maine Photographic Workshops Golden Light Award
Book of the Year 2005

MUSIC -

The music from Consent to Gravityas composed by Christopher Eastburn is now available on CD from Chris's listing at CD Baby

To elaborate on the connection, C.E. - "In thinking about writing vocal music for ANY project, a primary question is "What are the words?" Very fortunately Frederick Sommer left a treasure trove of those, in his writings, poems and lectures. These contain wonderfully rich lines such as "Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions", "The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation", "Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow."

So how does a text become a song? In approaching a set of words composers or songwriters often consider the images, meaning and feelings contained within the texts. Words or passages such as "collide", or "Vermeer", or "morning of creation" can trigger musical ideas or possibilities. The speech rhythms of a text also come in to play. You speak it aloud and listen to the rhythms and inflections. They can indicate a feeling of meter and melodic shape. Your concepts and intuitions may start to meld. What you are doing musically can become consciously and subconsciously interwoven with the feeling of the text. You may feel in the end that you wrote very little and just listened carefully for the music already there- in this case, the music sounding in Frederick Sommer's brilliant texts."

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