Frederick Sommer quotes:

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

Choice and chance structure art and nature.

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

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

Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.

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.

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

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

Photography is a distributive act leading to a privileged condition.

Reality is greater than our dreams.

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

Art accepts what it finds.

Art and accident are one.

... 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.