Photographer Quotes by Frederick Sommer

Reality is greater than our dreams.

— Frederick Sommer

Art and accident are one.

— Frederick Sommer

Art accepts what it finds.

— Frederick Sommer

Choice and chance structure art and nature.

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions.

— Frederick Sommer

Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.

— Frederick Sommer

We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted.

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

... art is images you carry. You cannot carry nature with you, but you carry images of nature. When you go out…

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

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

— Frederick Sommer

If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge…

— Frederick Sommer