Valise d'Adam 1949

Frederick Sommer concocted this small black and white photograph, "Valise d'Adam", from found objects. I can only imagine the pleasure he had finding these things and puzzling over how to put them together. It’s a bit like a Dadaist collage, maybe a Surrealist sculpture, but flattened. There’s this old metal plate, stained and corroded, with some kind of clamp attached to it, and then these partial doll parts, legs, arms, torso, cobbled into a weird figure. Is it a body? Is it a robot? It feels melancholy, yet there’s a lightness to it, a playfulness. You can sense Sommer’s humor, his willingness to be a bit absurd. He’s another trickster, like Duchamp, who knows that the most profound insights often come from simple, everyday objects and the way they can be combined to create something new and unexpected. It's a reminder that the world is full of potential for transformation and reinvention.