Photo synthesis.

THE ART OF FREDERICK SOMMER: PHOTOGRAPHY, DRAWING, COLLAGE

BY KEITH F. DAVIS, ET AL.

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

252 PP./$65.00 (HB)

RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD

BY RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD AND GUY DAVENPORT

NEW YORK AND GOTTINGEN, GERMANY: INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND STEIDL

300 PP./$60.00 (HB)

Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Frederick Sommer have long enjoyed the deep respect of photographic historians, curators, collectors, and many serious photographers, each having achieved near-cult status in some quarters. Yet, the work of both photographers has always been difficult to find. The catalog of Meatyard's major retrospective, Barbara Tannenbaum's Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary (1991), has long been out of print, and James Rhem's Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (2002) was not widely distributed. During his lifetime, Sommer's work was only published in small-circulation museum catalogs and monographs, in part because he exerted tight control over how his work was reproduced.

Neither photographer has been accorded a retrospective (or catalog) in the premier American museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, or the Chicago Art Institute. So, recent print appearances of Meatyard's and Sommer's work are most welcome. Keith F. Davis's The Art of Frederick Sommer is especially impressive, with excellent reproductions and an ambitious essay by Davis that frames Sommer's work within a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Ralph Eugene Meatyard, which accompanied an exhibition at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York City, presents the largest number of Meatyard photographs ever published in one place.

Meatyard and Sommer were very different people. Sommer lived in South America and Europe, along the way becoming fluent in several languages before settling in Arizona. He embodied old-world manners, erudition, and sensibility. Meatyard lived most of his life in Lexington, Kentucky, and rarely traveled beyond Kentucky and the Midwest. Sommer and his wife Francis fashioned a spartan life that was dedicated largely to the cultivation and production of his art; Frances served as the more-than-willing breadwinner. Meatyard shochorned his passions for photography and the arts into the middle-class activities of a devoted family man with three children. He ground lenses and fitted customers in his shop, Eyeglasses of Kentucky--a vocation in which he took considerable pride. Sommer was extremely patient in the creation of his art, sometimes allowing an idea to settle for months or even years. Meatyard, on the other hand, photographed mostly on weekends, packing his children into the car along with masks, props, cameras, and picnic supplies, and venturing into the Kentucky countryside. Sommer sometimes spent days in the darkroom working on a single negative. Meatyard did darkroom work sporadically, sometimes developing a year's worth of exposed film in a single marathon session. Sommer approached the final print with a finely honed perfectionism. Meatyard, making his art on the fly, was sometimes overly casual about archival processing, and this resulted in several prints deteriorating over the years. Sommer, working with a deliberation worthy of Vermeer, produced a relatively small body of work in his ninety-three years, whereas Meatyard, juggling his roles as father, businessman, and photographer, produced thousands of prints before dying of cancer just shy of his forty-seventh birthday.

Yet, for all of their differences, there were striking similarities in these two artists. Both men developed their art and ideas in relative isolation. Few people involved in the arts, then or now, would include Prescott, Arizona, or Lexington, Kentucky, as hotbeds of intellectual or aesthetic activity. Even if these artists thrived in relative isolation--a topic worthy of a separate essay--it would be a mistake to think of either as hermetic. In addition, both knew some of the best artists and thinkers of their time. Sommer was deeply influenced and supported by Max Ernst and Edward Weston, among others, while Meatyard's Kentucky claimed the likes of Wendell Berry, Van Deren Coke, Thomas Merton, and Guy Davenport, who selected the images for the ICP exhibition and catalog. Minor White was very supportive of both photographers, presenting major portfolios of their work in Aperture, for which he took a lot of flack from Aperture's more conservative readers. In their efforts to stay abreast of intellectual and artistic developments, Meatyard and Sommer amassed sizeable, well-read libraries in a diverse range of fields. Both were intrigued by the possibilities of applying theoretical, philosophical, scientific, and spiritual models to the theory and practice of photography. They also shared a deep and abiding interest in various kinds of music, buttressed by their collections of thousands of well-worn LPs.

Meatyard and Sommer were amateurs in the nineteenth-century sense: they were passionately engaged in an enterprise because of their love of the thing. As such, they joined the ranks of Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, John Herschel, and William Henry Fox Talbot. Neither Meatyard nor Sommer was careerist in their approach to photography, in part because neither depended upon it financially. Nonetheless, both photographers took their work very seriously, and both felt the sting of misunderstanding and rejection. During a weekend I spent with Sommer in Prescott in the early 1980s, he minced few words about feeling like an outsider in the photographic community, while recounting (with animation) the adverse reaction of some to his pictures of chicken entrails, dead animals, human body parts, and even the horizon-less landscapes. Meatyard, upon discovering that Beaumont Newhall had not included him in the 1964 edition of the History of Photography, dry-mounted his best-known print, Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce #3 (1964), onto a blank page in the front of his own copy of the book, wryly inserting himself into the canon, and with pride of place at that.

Meatyard and Sommer were both exceptionally versatile in their image-making. They photographed in the studio and in the world at large, ranging over various genres including, landscape, portraiture, assemblage, still-life, surrealist assemblages, and occasional nudes. Both artists experimented with various modes of abstraction and pushed the formal limits of the medium in order to explore the conceptual possibilities. The range of Meatyard's and Sommer's visions is directly related to their far-ranging intellectual curiosity. Rather than narrowing their focus, each wanted to discover what they believed to be the underpinnings that structured life and art. Both men were driven to discover what Gregory Bateson called "the patterns that connect." Their ambitions, as different in some respects as their personalities, nonetheless remind me of William Blake's cartoon-like drawing of a man climbing a ladder to the moon with the caption, I want! I want! With that kind of wanting, why limit oneself to a 300mm lens? The happy separation of money from their art liberated them from forging a contrived or restrictive coherence in their work. Both men followed their noses as well as their muses, and as a result, their photographs struck some as quirky or idiosyncratic.

The best work of Meatyard and Sommer evoke something rare in photography: the sense of the tragic. Neither Meatyard nor Sommer took pictures of explicitly tragic events. Nor did they approach the tragic in narrative ways that could embody concepts of traditional tragedy. We seldom find, in either body of work, explorations into hubris or the Fall or the grinding elements of Hegelian process or responses to the genocides and holocausts of the twentieth century. Rather, Meatyard and Sommer reached into more private realms of tragic consciousness. They were akin, in attitude and mental register, to poets like Blake, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens. They focused on simple objects, and in penetrating their surfaces and the images gathered about them--dare I say it?--the aura of the tragic. Eugene Atget, Imogen Cunningham, Josef Sudek, Weston, and others achieved this quality from time to time, but with Meatyard and Sommer, this sense of otherness in the familiar, of the dis-ease that can lurk behind surfaces, defined much of their work.

Synthesis, born of the capacity to glimpse and grapple with the tragic, binds Sommer's horizon-less landscapes, amputated or detached body parts, assemblage, and dead animals; so, too, with Meatyard's images of children, Zen twigs, and landscapes. Some of Meatyard's self-portraits (as far as I know Sommer never made any) are playful and ironic, while others are very dark, both as prints and as propositions. They attest to an inner life that contrasts the affable, engaged man who friends and family describe as the Meat-yard they knew. This predilection for the tragic, for finding deeper rhythms in the everyday, is most remarkably evidenced by the fact that both Meatyard and Sommer sustained their various genres of work simultaneously over a period of many years, returning to one mode or another when desire or inspiration struck. For both photographers, the subject matter per se, as well as the formal strategy employed, took a back seat. The mode of expression, the genre, and the formal strategy always served the idea.