This photograph comes originally from the collection of Dr. Ernest Born, Frederick Sommer’s physician, an amateur photographer, and the supplier of this and other unusual subject matter for Sommer’s camera. In 1940, Dr. Born gave Sommer a “perfectly formed placenta from the easiest birthing he had ever attended” (The Art of Frederick Sommer, pl. 222). The resulting image, tonally precise and filled with detail, takes its place within a series of rigorous still life studies Sommer executed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The photograph offered here is believed to be the earliest extant print of the image. The J. Paul Getty Museum owns another print.