Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Photography Exhibition: Philadelphia Museum of Art - Frederick Sommer Photographs

Frederick Sommers photograph of Max ErnstThe Philadelphia Museum of Art has become one of the foremost exhibitors of fine art photography in the nation. Frederick Sommer Photographs is a wonderful exhibition worthy of this great institution.

This exhibition will run through January 3, 2010
Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock.
This exhibition is the first of Sommer’s work in Philadelphia since 1968, and includes 40 images.
If you’re in the Philadelphia area through early January, I strongly suggest you take in this terrific exhibition.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.

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