Sommer’s Photos Capture Complex, Mystical Worlds

A superficial glance at Frederick Sommer’s pictures reveals about as much as a locked trunk does of its contents, quipped photographer Minor White. Sommer, who died early last year, was a complicated, fascinating artist, who shared with White a preoccupation with the meanings behind appearances. “There are physical indicators,” Sommer wrote, “when something metaphysical is happening.”

The Norton Simon Museum has staged a tribute to Sommer, composed of 18 of his photographs and an equal number by 13 other photographers--peers, influences, followers. Sommer, born in 1905 in Italy, worked as a landscape architect before adopting photography as a medium in 1930, while recuperating from tuberculosis in Switzerland. He settled permanently in Prescott, Ariz., in 1935, and spent the next six decades experimenting with photography’s ability to render simultaneously the corporeal and mystical worlds.

He photographed animal carcasses and placentas with unapologetic frankness and combined old engravings to make complex photographic montages. The Norton Simon show limits itself to the museum’s own holdings of Sommer’s black-and-white work from the late 1950s and early ‘60s, when he subverted the conventional role of the camera lens as surrogate eye and produced abstract, otherworldly images. Many were made without a camera at all. Cameraless photography had numerous incarnations before Sommer, but his twists on technique were pioneering, and the resulting images often curious and compelling.

He painted sheets of cellophane or coated them with grease and a filmy layer of smoke, then manipulated the surface with a stylus. Sandwiching these “synthetic negatives” between layers of glass in an enlarger, Sommer would make photographic prints. Though he disassociated himself with the Surrealist movement, these works show more than a trace of affinity for the practices of automatic drawing and unconscious free-association that the Surrealists favored. The images are abstract, vaguely organic, biomorphic--one evokes a slippery tangle of kelp, another a twisting human torso--and sumptuous in their range of tones against an inky black ground. Some seem calligraphic and bring to mind not just the Surrealists but the Abstract Expressionists who dominated the painting scene when Sommer was making these prints.

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After photographing a dancer wrapped in paper in 1962, Sommer began making pictures of suspended sheets of paper that he had cut with lyrical curls, lobes and flaps. Like the patterns in musical notation that he was also intrigued by, these beautifully fluid rhythms of light and shadow, dipping and curving, read like abstract notations of movement. Also on view are several less-than-inspiring nudes Sommer photographed in soft focus. The high-contrast blur reduces one figure with dark eyes and arms crossed over her chest into an ominous skull-and-crossbones.

Whether Sommer represented a physical body or recorded an expressive gesture in paint, his images have a lush tactility, a textural life that affirms his sense of the metaphysical nesting within the physical. It is light rebounding off the surface of objects that gives them a visual presence, just as it is our projection of meaning onto things that gives them significance. By foregrounding this phenomenon, Sommer reminds us that we’re in charge: “Life itself is not the reality,” he once wrote. “We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.”

The selection of prints by other photographers loosely traces Sommer’s own course, from scrutiny of the external world (Imogen Cunningham’s close-up flower studies and Edward Weston’s sculptural take on a pepper echo Sommer’s stares at animal anatomy) to more abstract musings on the world within. Spiritually infused images by Minor White, Edmund Teske, Leland Rice and Aaron Siskind, especially, put Sommer in the kind of company he liked to keep.

BE THERE

Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 449-6840, “A Tribute to Frederick Sommer, 1905-1999,” through March 26. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.