Jaromir Funke Czech, 1896-1945

Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a pioneer of avant-garde photography in Czechoslovakia and one of its most rigorous photographic theorists. He championed methods specific to the medium, above all the photogram, breaking with conventional representation to make light, shadow, and reflection the subjects of the photograph rather than merely means of description. His abstract still lifes and compositions built around diagonals, unusual perspectives, and extreme angles emerged from this pursuit of photography’s distinctive visual language.

Born in Skuteč, in eastern Bohemia, in 1896, Funke studied medicine, law, and philosophy at Charles University in Prague without completing a degree in any of the three. He came to photography through the amateur movement. In 1924, he founded the Czech Photographic Society with Josef Sudek and Adolf Schneeberger, opposing the Pictorialist orientation of Czech photography in favor of the medium’s documentary potential. A triple portrait of the three photographers survives from that year, and Funke photographed Sudek in 1928.

Funke’s reputation rests largely on the work of the mid-1920s. In series such as Abstract Photo, he arranged glass, paper, and simple objects in raking light, allowing cast shadows to dominate the image until the objects themselves nearly disappear. Developed independently of the photogram experiments of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, these photographs arrived at a comparable abstraction by a distinct route. In Time Persists (1932), Funke extended the same attentiveness to light, form, and surface to the commonplace details of a courtyard.

From 1931, Funke taught at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava, whose curriculum drew on the Bauhaus, and from 1935 at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague. In Bratislava, his practice turned toward social documentary photography, and he joined Sociofoto, a leftist group dedicated to recording the living conditions of the poor. He also wrote extensively on photography and, from 1939 to 1941, edited the magazine Fotografický obzor with Josef Ehm.

Funke died in Prague in 1945, at the age of forty-eight, in the final weeks of the Second World War.