Funke in focus

In a tranquil, leafy courtyard behind an apartment house in Malá Strana, the Josef Sudek Atelier - a replica of the famed photographer's studio - is currently holding a show by Sudek's contemporary and longtime friend Jaromír Funke (1896-1945).

This exhibition of more than 20 works focuses on a single series: abstract compositions made between 1927 and 1929. With its tight focus, the show offers an excellent opportunity to see in depth how Funke responded to the avant-garde push toward abstraction while remaining true to "straight photography," ultimately rejecting noncamera methods such as the photogram and photomontage as counter to the true spirit of photography.

Funke saw his purist path as the best one for Modernist photography, viewing manipulation of the negative or print and the photogram as a dead end (though he did his own experiments with photograms in the mid-1920s). Although he admired Man Ray, whom he never met, the American exponent of the photogram became kind of an adversary in terms of an approach to photographic image-making.

While Funke's close friend Sudek achieved international renown, Funke's important contribution to 20th-century photography has been recognized more slowly. Though he is acknowledged as one of the major figures in Czech avant-garde photography between the wars, last summer the first major exhibition of his work outside his home country in almost a quarter of a century was held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Sudek himself recognized his friend's forward-looking work early on. As photo historian Antonín Dufek quotes from Sudek's writings in his monograph on Funke: "While I was slapping together still lifes, he was taking nonfigurative photographs in Kolín." Both natives of that central Bohemian city, Funke and Sudek met in Prague while the latter was completing his formal art schooling, and together they later established the Czech Photographic Society, an amateur association formed in opposition to the conservative main amateur club. Sudek became a professional, setting up his own photo studio in 1928, but Funke chose to remain an amateur, and the Washington show emphasized Funke's position in the "amateur avant-garde" movement of the time.

According to Dufek, Funke's experimental works of the late 1920s - the abstract compositions in the show at the Sudek Atelier - were perceived as "Cubist aberrations." Funke himself was a prolific writer on art theory, and his texts make it clear that his abstract experiments did not stem from Cubism, which he considered passé by that point.

While his 1927-29 "Abstract Photo" series constitutes a logical progression from his previous still lifes, by the late 1920s shadow and light became more important than the tangible objects. When Funke does place an actual object in a photograph - a fern frond, a wire whisk - it seems almost out of place, tugging the viewer back to reality from the ambiguous tableau he has created from shadows layered over reflected light.

His work had been leading in this direction for several years, but in this series light and shadow finally become the primary subject matter. Through non-objective expression, he, like other avant-garde artists of the time, attempted to turn the medium itself into the main focus.

In the "Abstract Photo" series, Funke captures a variety of forms, sometimes readily identifiable (a bottle, a pair of scissors, a key, some writing implements) and other times blending into an indistinguishable tangle of shadows. The fundamental element in these works is the relationship between object, light and shadow. Funke was fascinated with illusion and reality, how they piece together, how easily one slips in front of or behind the other, how they overlap and leave gaps of uncertainty.

After this series, Funke made a series of shop-window reflections that approximated photomontages made by other avant-garde artists. He also reintroduced objects into his still lifes and went outdoors to photograph the landscape, city views and buildings - all with his inimitable tilted perspective. His quest was to make unmanipulated photographs with a camera yet at the same time peruse an avant-garde strategy. He did with the fundamental tools of photography what Man Ray had done without a camera and what others had achieved by manipulating the negative or print. Funke's was ultimately the more purely photographic path.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com