Sommerisms—A Student Remembers Fred Sommer

"Why do I have to take photography? I'm going to major in Visual Design!" was a protest that might have been overheard at the Institute of Design during registration for the 1956 fall semester. The response would have been twofold: Everybody who enters ID, no matter what their previous education or level of development, must take the foundation course, and the foundation course includes photography. Additionally, as a practicing visual designer you will be working with photographs, and two years of photo will give you training that will help you use photographs intelligently.
	After 40 plus years as a graphic designer, I can say that the theory worked—at times too well when, with sinking heart, I would observe the low-budget, so-called photography I would be required to use. Where is the wonderful photography I learned about at the Institute of Design?
	Our second year instructor would have been Harry Callahan, but he was in Europe on a Graham Foundation grant for the academic year 1957-58. Frederick Sommer was invited to take his place for that year.  When I mentioned to Misch Kohn that Mr. Sommer would be teaching photography, his response was "Ah—our resident surrealist!"
	Fred was a wonderful human being and a stimulating presence, not only to photography hopefuls, but to anybody with a creative urge and a curious mind. He frequently astonished us with his ideas and suggestions. A few Sommerisms have remained in memory.
	One of Fred's notions was that if you were to attach a camera to your belt and set it to shoot randomly as you walked along, with no further control over the camera, wonderful photographs would result. Another was that photography was only in its infancy, and that future technological advancements we couldn't possibly anticipate would occur, taking photography to levels beyond our wildest dreams. This was in 1957-58. Whether Fred knew about the holographic work being done in the Soviet Union and in the US at the University of Michigan, resulting in the first optical holograms in 1962, is anybody's guess.
	Print down the corners: Fred didn't spend a lot of time on technical matters with visual design students, but he was very strong about the importance of printing down–darkening—the corners of prints. He said that's how he printed his own pictures. This was necessary to achieve the photo's correct tonal balance, and if done right, the only thing obvious to the viewer would be that the photo was well printed.  
	In this connection, Fred took our class to the Art Institute of Chicago to see a traveling exhibition of paintings by Georges Seurat. I don't remember if he said that Seurat darkened the corners of his canvasses, but he did claim that he painted their borders in contrasting tonal ranges to complement and control the neighboring areas inside the borders. Some of us examined the borders carefully, and we concluded that he was correct, at least about the effect, if perhaps not about Seurat's intentions. Light areas of the pictures were often bordered, in Seurat's pointillist manner, with darker colors, and vice versa.
	Music: Fred's idea about Beethoven's compositional method was perhaps the most difficult of his notions to absorb. One day he brought in a Beethoven miniature symphonic score and pointed out that the back-and-forth exchange between different sections of the orchestra resulted in a beautiful design of clusters and swirls on the score. When the strings were playing and the horns were silent, for example, large portions of the page remained blank, while beautiful dancing clusters of notes prevailed in other areas. He said this lovely visual effect was done deliberately by Beethoven. Some of us persisted in believing that the notes on paper were a reflection of the music in Beethoven's head. But we had no more window into Beethoven's brain than he did. Well, if you say so, Fred . . . 
	I only learned much later that Fred had written music scores in a technique based on his ideas. They consisted of elegant scratchings, jottings, lines, smears, and pale color washes. One of his scores was played in 1941 by a pianist named Faurest Davis, and his music was publicly performed at Prescott College in 1968 by Stephen Aldrich, piano, and Walton Mendelson, flute, and by the same musicians again in 1990. At one Prescott performance, where the musicians independently played whatever Fred's notations suggested, they stopped at one point and discovered that they were at about the same place in the score. Anyone interested in this and other aspects of Frederick Sommer's amazing artistic accomplishments—photography, drawing, painting, collage, poetry— can learn more at the Frederick Sommer Foundation website.
	Drawings: A group of his sewing machine drawings was included in a 1957 exhibition of Fred's work at IIT's Crown Hall. The imagery consisted of bizarre forms, shapes, or figures in white and colored threads sewn on black paper. I spoke briefly with him about them, and without quite saying outright that I should consider purchasing one, he gently suggested that they were "very reasonably priced . . ." I don't remember their prices, but how I've cursed myself since then for not buying one!
	An unexpected unexpected: During that year, either at his Crown Hall exhibition or in a photo magazine, I came across a Fred Sommer photo of a lovely young girl posing with a cello. Being familiar with his pictures of desiccated coyotes and similar unorthodox subject matter, it was a surprise to see this sweet picture that the girl's parents might have commissioned as a formal portrait. I mentioned this to Aaron, to which he replied "Oh, Fred has ideas about classical line and symmetry" —or words to that effect.
	As mentioned before, Fred didn't spend much time on technical issues, but what we learned from him was that anything is possible, and that we should follow our flights of fancy, wherever they took us.
	I had many wonderful experiences and met inspiring people at ID, both instructors and fellow students, but exposure to the mind of Frederick Sommer remains one of the strongest influences of my life. 	What a marvelous privilege it is to have known him!
		Richard Sessions, ID 1956-1960