Frederick Sommer
My photographs are not pure: they are a seething wealth of imperfection.Collection: Photography
... art is images you carry. You cannot carry nature with you, but you carry images of nature. When you go out to make a picture you find you are moved by something which is in agreement with an image you already held within yourself.Collection: Photography
In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.Collection: Photography
Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.Collection: Photography
Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions.Collection: Photography
Art is the splendor of reality before everything has become meaning.Collection: Photography
Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been?Collection: Photography
Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.Collection: Art
Reality is greater than our dreams.Collection: Photography
The only way to understand something is to be confronted by something that is difficult to understand.Collection: Photography
The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Dimensions
Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.Collection: Photography
The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine its possible relatedness to other things.Collection: Photography
Art accepts what it finds.Collection: Photography
We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted.Collection: Photography
Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition.Collection: Photography
Words represent images: nothing can be said for which there is no image.Collection: Said
Everything is shared by everything else; there are no discontinuities.Collection: Photography
I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Photography
Art and accident are one.Collection: Photography
Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.Collection: Photography
The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operatedCollection: Photography
Choice and chance structure art and nature.Collection: Photography