About

Frederick Robert Archer was an American photographer who collaborated with Ansel Adams to create the Zone System. He was associated with pictorialism and specialized early in his career in portraits of Hollywood movie stars. In 1914, Archer was a founding member of the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. His work also included experimentation with abstraction and photograms, and he was a pioneer in advertising photography on the West Coast.

Archer and Adams formulated the Zone System while teaching together at the Art Center School in Los Angeles around 1939-1940, where Archer helped found the photography department and served as professor of photography beginning in 1935. After World War II, he founded and ran his own Fred Archer School of Photography in Los Angeles.

Archer’s photographs were included in “Southern California Photography, 1900-1965: An Historical Survey” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1980-1981, alongside the work of Edward Weston, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Imogen Cunningham. The show was part of the bicentennial celebration of Los Angeles. His photographs are held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Getty Museum, George Eastman Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.