Jaromír Funke's Abstract Photo series of 1927–1929: History in the making

Abstract

In a suite of approximately twenty abstract still lifes from the late 1920s, Czech photographer Jaromír Funke boldly took shadow and mat board as his primary compositional elements. Amateur and avant-garde aesthetic stances balance in these self-reflexive works in a way that is paradigmatic for the era of high modernism in central European photography. Funke emulated here formal devices explored in Cubism and the photogram, whereby phenomenal reality is converted into a fragmentary sign system. In good amateur fashion, however, he refused to abandon mastery, to accept ready-made elements as in cubist collage, or cultivate chance as Man Ray did in his camera-less images. Indeed, in an article on Man Ray published near the start of this series, Funke suggested by implication his greatest ambition with Photo: to shape a history of the photographic medium and to indicate where that history is headed.