Frederick Sommer Quotes & Sayings

Art is the splendor of reality before everything has become meaning. — Frederick Sommer

The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions. — Frederick Sommer

In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation. — Frederick Sommer

Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles. — Frederick Sommer

Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions. — Frederick Sommer

Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been? — Frederick Sommer

The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated — Frederick Sommer

If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found. — Frederick Sommer

Reality is greater than our dreams. — Frederick Sommer

Choice and chance structure art and nature. — Frederick Sommer

The only way to understand something is to be confronted by something that is difficult to understand. — Frederick Sommer

The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine its possible relatedness to other things. — Frederick Sommer

Art is images you carry. You cannot carry nature with you, but you carry images of nature. When you go out to make a picture you find you are moved by something which is in agreement with an image you already held within yourself. — Frederick Sommer

Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play. — Frederick Sommer

Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow. — Frederick Sommer

Art accepts what it finds. — Frederick Sommer

We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted. — Frederick Sommer

I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic. — Frederick Sommer

My photographs are not pure: they are a seething wealth of imperfection. — Frederick Sommer

Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition. — Frederick Sommer

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities. — Frederick Sommer

The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation. — Frederick Sommer

Everything is shared by everything else; there are no discontinuities. — Frederick Sommer

Words represent images: nothing can be said for which there is no image. — Frederick Sommer

Art and accident are one. — Frederick Sommer