Untitled

Frederick Sommer

1957 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Over a career that spanned seven decades, Sommer created an influential and deeply idiosyncratic body of work in a variety of mediums: primarily photographs but also drawings, paintings, collages, architectural and landscape designs, and musical scores. In the mid-1950s he began making cameraless images using painted pieces of cellophane as negatives. Working quickly to preserve a sense of spontaneity, he applied viscous oil paint to between ten and twenty sheets of cellophane at a time. Because of the reversal of tones, the painted areas appear white in the resulting contact prints, creating the illusion that the gestural marks were made by wiping away the surrounding black ground.

Artist

Frederick Sommer

Date

1957

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 1994