NARRATOR:
To produce this photograph, Frederick Sommer didn’t use a camera. Instead, he created what is called a “synthetic negative.” He dripped oil paint onto a sheet of cellophane, then manipulated the paint to create the shapes and effects you see here. Next, Sommer pressed the cellophane between two sheets of glass, and used it as a negative to print this photograph. The swirls and textures bring to mind a torso from Classical antiquity, perhaps clad in gleaming armor.
This extraordinary transformation of oil on cellophane into a photographic print fits the picture’s title. It’s called Paracelsus, after Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, a 16th-century alchemist. Paracelsus was also the official physician of the city of Basel, Switzerland.
Alchemy was a medieval chemical philosophy that sought to turn base metals into gold and to discover an elixir of longevity. Not until the 18th and 19th centuries was it carved off from the hard sciences, becoming associated instead with metaphysics. Sommer rejected the limitations of such labels, blending the science of photography with other, more subjective means of creative expression.
Sommer’s imagination was limitless, and he continued to explore new and innovative photographic techniques until shortly before his death in 1999. He said:
FREDERICK SOMMER (ACTOR):
“The world is a reality not because of the way it is, but because of the possibilities it presents.”
Paracelsus (Paint on Cellophane)
1959
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Not on View
During the mid-1950s, Sommer began a series of camera-less photographs. While the practice of creating photographic prints without the use of a camera had been pioneered in the 1920s by Man Ray and László Mohology-Nagy, Sommer used his skills as a painter and draftsman to take the process in a completely new direction. To create these images, Sommer made a synthetic negative by painting on cellophane with oil paint, which was then place onto sensitized paper. The opacity of the oil, under surface tension, produced an image that when suspended between two plates of glass could be placed in an enlarger and used as a negative to print a photograph.
"Paracelsus," with its remarkable distribution of tones and textures, is suggestive of a gleaming, armored torso. Sommer titled this photograph after Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493-1541), a noted figure in the realms of alchemy and medical science. Sommer was among those who sought the reintegration of physics and metaphysics.
Details
- Artist Name: Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
- Title: Paracelsus (Paint on Cellophane)
- Date: 1959
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: Image: 13-1/2 x 10-1/4 in. (34.3 x 26 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Gift of the Artist
- Accession Number: PH.1965.1.05
- Copyright: ©Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation
Object Information
- Armory Center for the Arts/Art Center College of Design, Radical Past: Contemporary Art & Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974, p. 29
- Gloria Williams, The Collectible Moment: Catalogue of Photographs in the Norton Simon Museum,2006, cat. 350 p. 243
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