Arizona Landscape
Photograph
1943 (photographed)
1943 (photographed)
Artist/Maker | |
Place of origin |
Frederick Sommer started photographing landscape around 1939, having bought a large-format camera the previous year. With their flattened compositions and meticulous detail, his desert scenes suggest the plans and maps he would have made when working as a landscape architect. Their patterning, minimal shadow and omitted horizon also have much in common with the ‘all-over’ field paintings of American Abstract Expressionist artists in the 1940s and 1950s. Sommer’s atomised landscapes, devoid of human presence, can be seen to share with Abstract Expressionism a sense of existential unease in the face of global war.
Object details
Categories | |
Object type | |
Title | Arizona Landscape (assigned by artist) |
Materials and techniques | Gelatin-silver print |
Brief description | 'Arizona Landscape, 1943', photograph by Frederick Sommer (1905-1999) |
Physical description | Photograph |
Dimensions |
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Gallery label |
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Credit line | Given by the photographer 1993 |
Historical context | Frederick Sommer’s photographs marry a surrealist imagination with brilliant photographic technique: the airless Arizona Landscapes are his most famous and personal creation. Devoid of markers of scale or distance, these panoramic views seem like endless expanses of space, immeasurable and sublime. In 1939 he created a series of grotesque still-lifes, depicting the heads and entrails of chickens with perfect precision. Sommer’s images are often akin to surrealist paintings, mysterious, tense or foreboding in mood, and suggesting as he said, that "something metaphysical is happening". |
Place depicted | |
Summary | Frederick Sommer started photographing landscape around 1939, having bought a large-format camera the previous year. With their flattened compositions and meticulous detail, his desert scenes suggest the plans and maps he would have made when working as a landscape architect. Their patterning, minimal shadow and omitted horizon also have much in common with the ‘all-over’ field paintings of American Abstract Expressionist artists in the 1940s and 1950s. Sommer’s atomised landscapes, devoid of human presence, can be seen to share with Abstract Expressionism a sense of existential unease in the face of global war. |
Collection | |
Accession number | E.999-1993 |
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Record created | November 24, 2004 |
Record URL |
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