Frederick Sommer has been a creator of images for nearly sixty years. Highly regarded as a unique figure in 20th century photography, his reputation as an artist has been based on a remarkably small number of images which reflect a career concerned not with output but with the careful and considered oeuvre. One could say of Sommer that an image would not be created unless it needed to be. Sommer's 1980 retrospective, organized by the Delaware Art Museum and named for the image offered here, was accompanied by a catalogue and a separate visual checklist to the exhibition of 102 images, the closest attempt to a catalogue raisonné of the artist's photographic work.

Sommer has nearly always created photographs from his own sources of found objects, collaged or arranged, from matrices created for the enlarger or contact printed and from cut-paper sheets of abstract figurations. When lighted and then photographed by Sommer, these images transcend the scale and tone of the original subject.

Venus, Jupiter and Mars is an image seemingly risen from the detritus of a decayed wall perhaps in some forgotten café. Its careful positioning of elements beckons the viewer to understand what might lie beneath the surface of images, as if in an x-ray of an x-ray. Anatomically, the figures are seen having both skin and skeleton. It is an element like the spider's leg for example, composing the cheek and ear of Venus, that Sommer thoughtfully places so it becomes nearly invisible, causing the eye to accept it all as if Nature herself created it.