Frederick Sommer Quotes

Art and accident are one.

Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

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

Art accepts what it finds.

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

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

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.

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

In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.

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

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

Reality is greater than our dreams.

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.