Still Life

During the early 1920s, Jaromir Funke was taking soft-focus Pictorialist photographs on the streets of his native Prague, but he soon developed into one of the leading figures in Czech avant-garde photography with constructed still lifes such as this one. Like his American contemporary Schamberg, Funke was fascinated by the transformation and decontextualization of familiar subjects during the photographic process. By grouping and regrouping bottles and glass plates in his studio and lighting them with strong, raking light, Funke created a number of arrangements of shifting forms and shadows that verge on the completely nonrepresentational. Still, this modernist composition, with its witty play of shapes and angled tabletop, retains a lyricism and softness that is characteristic of Funke and his fellow Czech photographers.