Frederick Sommer Quotes

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

The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation.

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

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

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

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

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

The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.

Choice and chance structure art and nature.

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

Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition.

Art accepts what it finds.

Art and accident are one.

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

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

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

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

Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.

Reality is greater than our dreams.

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

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.

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

In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.