Real Magic

John Vettese sees what develops

by John Vettese

It feels like Frederick Sommer's images are begging for vivid adjectives and heady descriptions.

"Bewitching" comes to mind; the portraiture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Frederick Sommer Photographs" shows subjects who seem entranced, stoically gazing about in an attempt to come to terms with the doldrums by which they're surrounded.

"Desolate" works, as well; the first foray the Italy-born, Brazil-bred Sommer took into photography was in the desert surrounding Prescott, Ariz., where he lived and worked for most of his life. Or "ghastly," which is how I'm guessing the tourists bolting from the exhibit on my first visit felt about his "Chicken Parts" series.

But after a few trips through the show, I keep coming back to a chestnut of critical jargon: "magical realism." This goes against the conventional wisdom tying Sommer's work more specifically to surrealism. Perhaps he is viewed in that regard for his iconic 1946 portrait of surrealist/Dadaist painter Max Ernst (pictured). But as far as the PMA retrospective goes, that Ernst image is the closest the photographer gets to achieving a truly surreal image.

In it, the painter is shirtless, standing against a doorway. Superimposed on top of him is a shot of a rock, its dark shades and sharp grooves blending with Ernst's pale white skin to make him look quite literally statuesque, or like a thinly translucent spectre.

This effect was achieved by sandwiching two negatives atop each other. And although many of the show's other images prove equally confounding and compelling (like "Venus, Jupiter, Mars," where two illustrated men and a woman sit for afternoon tea in the middle of a forest), these otherworldly appearances are largely achieved through natural means, not manipulation in the studio (it's a close crop of an old advertisement poster, torn to reveal the poster beneath).

Look at Sommer's Arizona landscapes, which he famously shot without horizon lines. Aiming downward, sizing up the land in a tight square, we see dust and rocks and cacti crisscrossing the scene repetitively, abstracting the grayish-beige desert to create the illusion that this land is eternally expansive. (If you've driven through Arizona, you'll surely relate.)

While in the desert, Sommer also gravitated toward dead and decaying coyotes, but played a different trick in their capture. His exposure was based on their bones, not the overall scene. This makes the protruding skeleton pop in prominent white, while the rest of the animal and its surroundings — withered skin, matted fur, leaves, dirt — show up in denser tones, dropping from dark gray to black. It's like the coyote is being pulled into the ground, becoming part of the land where it expired.

These popping highlights amid gray tones are also used on "Livia," the most striking image in the exhibit. It shows a blond-haired young girl in pigtails wearing a pouty facial expression. Everything is dark gray — the girl's skin, her hair, the wall she stands against — except for her white dress and the whites of her eyes, which cut free from the image with a startling acuteness. The gaze is haunting — is Livia menacing? Angry? Moreover, is she angry with you, the viewer? So strongly rendered is this image that it effectively breaks loose of the frame into the reality of the gallery, eradicating the boundary between viewer and object.

But that eradication is achieved with an image that depicts a very real scene, exactly as Sommer shot it; short of his exposure decisions, no manipulation or trickery was involved in making the photo so transfixing. Same for the coyote, or the desert scenes, or the crumbling posters, all of which are images grounded in terra firma, but framed in a way that makes the viewer question their reality.

The same could even be argued for Sommer's delightfully macabre "Chicken Parts" series, in which he takes guts and entrails of slaughtered poultry, and arranges them to make faces and scenes — in one, a bird's intestine is stretched over its head in a drape, so only the beak is protruding. It looks like the bird is wearing a burka. Sommer arranged the scenes, yes, but they're very real, tactile objects.

Think of them as rather gruesome still lifes that magically evoke something more.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

Through Jan. 3, free with $16 admission, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.