The Terrain of Seeing: Photographs by Frederick Sommer, Mark Klett, and Michael Berman

Location:  Etherton Gallery Downtown 135 S. Sixth Avenue

Exhibition Dates: September 6 – November 5th, 2005

Reception:  Saturday, September 10th, 7-10 p.m.

Hours:  11-5 Tuesday - Saturday, 11-7 Thursday

Contact: Jerre Johnston 624-7370 

Contents: The Terrain of Seeing is a photographic exhibition that exercises the act of seeing in works that extend visual experience by giving form to the mysteries found in both the real and unseen worlds. From the salutary effect of visual clarity as realized in geographic areas seen and captured, to the rendering of feelings for things in and of themselves, photographers Frederick Sommer, Mark Klett, and Michael Berman capture the unexpected, unseen and unending forms that reality assumes.

Frederick Sommer: One of the great masters and key innovators in the history of photography, Frederick Sommer is known for his wide range of unconventional methodologies and techniques. From his embrace of the large-format camera and his exquisite print quality to his use of constructed subjects and synthetic negatives, Sommer’s created photographs “seem to exercise the very act of seeing while calling into question what is considered worthy of examination.” In this way he set the precedent for scores of modernist and postmodern photographers who derail the province of description and create images that are constructed by the mind of what Hegel referred to as "the sensuous semblance of the idea."  

Sommer purchased his first camera in 1930 while recovering from tuberculosis in Switzerland. He began painting and drawing after arriving in Arizona in 1931. After three years in Tucson, he and his wife moved to the high desert town of Prescott, Arizona where they lived for more than six decades. After meeting Alfred Stieglitz in 1935 and Edward Weston in 1936, Sommer’s interest in photography deepened and he quickly became a master of the medium. Precisionist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Surrealist and Dadaist artist Max Ernst, and photographer Aaron Siskind also influenced Sommer. In 1938 he acquired an eight-by-ten inch view camera allowing him to work on a scale that revealed more than the eye sees, hence capturing the precision and sense of space that he had seen in Weston’s work and that of the painter-photographer Sheeler.

The image making process, in a step-by-step remove from straight photography, is realized in many free-form procedures. Lyrical abstractions called photogenics (cameraless photographic processes) were created by artist/photographers like Barbara Moragan, who frequently combined light drawing, photograms, and montage in the same image. Cameraless imagery that combined photogram techniques (placing objects on sensitized paper or film) with a modern version of cliché verre (French for glass negative) enabled the artist to work abstractly. The variants of cliché verre appealed to photographer-artist Sommer, who began to work with glass and cellophane in the 1950’s. The infinite possibilities offered by pressing oil paint between sheets of cellophane or fuming candle smoke on glass to create non-objective shapes, along with assemblage, and montage quickly became a part of his far-reaching aesthetic. Preferring documentary essays and aesthetically pleasing landscapes, Sommer’s work was largely dismissed by a public who viewed such work as unphotographic.

The concept of “lyrical invention,” revelatory ideas about the image making process, and as Keith Davis states, “work (that) is steeped in a profound awareness of -and love for – the history of creative thought,” are a few of the hallmarks of Sommer’s contemplative aesthetic. This exhibition also includes Sommer’s masterful drawings, musical scores, and collages. His unparalleled ability to “explore, stretch, and blend the possibilities of his chosen media” are realized in Sommer’s lyrical intuition. Although he resisted association with the early Surrealists and Dadaists, their autonomous reworking of existing material influenced Sommer’s approach to the selection of seminal imagery including found objects.  “Structure, imagination and transformation,” the hallmarks of Sommer’s work, can best be illuminated in his own words,

Whatness is concerned with content.
In the solemnity of every hour life returns.
Whereness is concerned with linkages.
The legato of one squirrel holds a forest together.

When the fine-art photography market was in its infancy in the early 1970s, Sommer signed on as one of the original 13 artists to be exclusively represented by the Light Gallery, one of only two galleries in New York devoted to photography at the time. In 1976, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson acquired a major collection of his photographs. In 1992, Nazraeli Press in Tucson, Arizona, published a book of his work, All Children Are Ambassadors, and subsequently issued two boxed reproductions of his images on cards. The Getty Museum acquired more than 100 of his drawings, photographs and collages in 1994 and the same year held an exhibition of his work. Frederick Sommer died on January 23, 1999, at his home in Prescott, Arizona. He was 93.

Mark Klett: With his continuing exploration of the natural environment and our signature treatment of the land, Mark Klett renders the relatedness of humankind and nature. While the Southwestern landscape is his primary subject matter, his main concern is the experiential act of perceiving lands permeated with the rhythms and forces of existence derived from different people and our ever evolving cultural identity. His images are commentaries on the increasing evidence of people in the twenty-first-century landscape as it is abandoned, exploited and periodically reclaimed by nature.

Recent works include diptychs and panoramic color work from a collaborative project created with photographer and educator, Byron Wolfe, called The Third View, which began in 1997 and completed in 2000. Over the course of four years the project revisited 109 historic western American landscape sites, all subjects of nineteenth-century American western survey photographs. The project’s "rephotographs" were made from the originals’ vantage points with as much precision as possible. Every attempt was also made to duplicate the original photographs' lighting conditions, both in time of day and year. Third View was created specifically to investigate changes that have occurred since the landscape sites were last photographed, a time period ranging from twenty to one hundred and thirty years.

Topographical photographs as realized in rephotography” project an artistic view with content. Our value laden concepts of beauty, as seen through the lens of the early exploration photographers who used the beautiful scene to provide images that were appropriated for political purposes, is now being revised. For Klett and Wolfe part of this revision took place over the course of three summers when they explored Yosemite National Park with old photographs as their guides.

Eadweard Muybridge’s taste for the impressed delicacies of texture and atmospheric improvisations in 1872, Edward Weston’s stark trajectory across a scape of pure water in 1937, and Ansel Adams testimony to the majestic rise of clouded glacial domes, circa 1942, were the perceptive variants of vision that writer Rebecca Solnit and photographer’s, Mark Klett, and Byron Wolfe held in hand as they arrived at the lakeshore of Tenayaya halfway between Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows.

Returning to the sites of images taken up to 140 years earlier they were able to measure the changes that had taken place with, as Solnit states, “the eerie precision rephotography provides.” Among the myriad changes, was the discovery the Merced River in western Yosemite Valley had moved dozens of feet from where its bed had been when Muybridge photographed it in 1872. The result are photographic renderings of old and new, four panoramic moments in time, and place are wed in a continuous sweep that brings color into the mix of extant nature as once interpreted in gradated tones of black and white.  

Mark Klett lives in Tempe and teaches in the Art Department at Arizona State University. One of the most celebrated photographers of our time, Klett’s work has been widely exhibited in the major museums and galleries of Europe, the U. S., and Japan. He is currently working on a rephotographic survey of San Francisco and Yosemite. Klett’s many published works include, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project 1984, Central Arizona Project Photographic Survey 1986, Traces of Eden: Travels in the Desert Southwest 1986, Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest by Mark Klett 1992, Desert Legends: Restoring the Sonoran Borderlands (Text by Gary Nabhan) 1994, and Third Views and Second Sights a collaborative book with Byron Wolfe, a photographer and educator living in Chico, California.

The project’s original field team included photographers Mark Klett (Project Director and
Chief Photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project), Kyle Bajakian, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron Wolfe. Writer William L. Fox and photographer Michael Marshall later joined this group in its second and third season respectively. The project combines interests in fine art photography, history, literature, the natural and social sciences, new digital technologies, design, and interactive media. Byron Wolfe is a photographer and educator living in Chico, California. His other projects include the collaborative book and interactive DVD-ROM,Third Views and Second Sights (co-published by the Museum of New Mexico and The Center for American Places). He is the 2004 recipient of the Santa Fe Prize for Photography.

Michael Berman: Berman’s new large format photographs of desert terrain and the inevitable evidence of its dissolution of an empty swimming pool transformed into the skaters’ graffitied-slick-sided haven have a rendered quality that recalls Frederick Sommer’s packed edge to edge observation of a totality. As he processes the recognizable links between effects of visual clarity imbued with a feeling for the suchness of things, Berman involves us in a continual pull between overall perception and the intuition that gives us knowledge of the phenomenal world.

Berman’s media also includes mixed-media paintings, drawings and photographic installations. While his work participates in the romantic tradition of Western landscape photography, referentially signifying nature in its most primal state, the metaphor of the natural vista as a symbol of the sublime is often a point of departure. Because it is not easy to separate the role of humanity from the role of nature, Berman uses the nomenclatures we have imposed on the landscape as a device to play in the arena between the artifice of site-specific installation and the documentation of geographic areas seen and captured. Berman’s large format photographs of the wilderness in Arizona and New Mexico deserts invite us to focus our attention on the pure photographic aesthetic and the power of the “natural site.” Devoid of ecological or social lesson, Berman’s work considers the essentialist landscape as measured by time, a landscape with a history of its own ordering. His works chronicle the place prepared by shadows, weathering, and a succession of season, habitats where plants are not adapted or planted but scatter or circle according to their own scenario.

Like Frederick Sommer and Mark Klett, Berman’s use of the landscape as content testifies to that place between the continuous production of meaning within a simulated topography and the chronicling of the timeless vistas of nature. A place that belongs to neither photography nor reality, it is the place the artist occupies as emulator, imitator, and innovator.