Frederick Sommer miscellaneous acquisitions collection

Frederick Sommer was born in Italy on September 7, 1905, however, Sommer was raised in Brazil. In 1927 Sommer earned his Master’s in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University. While studying at Cornell Sommer met Elisabeth Watson. The pair married in 1928. Sommer and Watson did not have children. In 1931 Sommer and Watson moved to Tucson, Arizona. The couple relocated again in 1935 this time to Prescott, Arizona. On November 18, 1939 Sommer became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1930 Sommer was diagnosed with tuberculosis, it was a year after this diagnosis that Sommer first began to experiment with photography. Sommer began with works such as watercolor and ink drawings of musical scores. In 1938 Sommer came to possess an 8 X 10 Century Universal camera and began to seriously experiment with photography. Sommer’s photography includes still lifes, jarred subjects, horizontal landscapes, cliché verre negatives, and nudes. Sommer had relationships with many other photographers including Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Aaron Siskind, Richard Nikel, and Minor White.

In addition to photography Sommer was also interested in musical scores. Sommer did not play music nor could he read music. While in Los Angeles in 1934 Sommer came across an art museum and was intrigued by the display of musical scores. Sommer would then go on to experiment with the correlation between the way a score was noted and the way the score was heard. Sommer would draw musical scores in order to better test this theory. Sommer did not play and thus would invite various musical acquaintances over to play the musical scores that he had drawn. The first public musical performance of Sommer’s music was performed in on May 9, 1968 at Prescott College where Sommer was on the faculty.

Sommer died on January 23, 1999.