Incollect Magazine - Issue 11

76 www.incollect.com Mitchell Funk Robert Funk Fine Art “Mitchell Funk was a pioneer of art photography in color,” explains Robert Funk, his brother and the owner of Robert Funk Fine Art in Miami. In 1970, Mitchell participated in the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Images en Couleur, one of the first color photography shows at a major museum. His striking image Black Hippie Girl, Bethesda Fountain, 1969, was one of the works included in that show and in many ways epitomizes the artist’s early photographic style — the use of bold, almost surreal Dayglo color, dramatic light, and tightly cropped, compact compositions shot from a distance. “Color photography was not considered fine art back then,” explains Robert, who goes on to explain how his brother Mitchell pioneered a creative fusion between “the fluorescent photographic imagery of advertising and the casual, somewhat informal snapshot quality of contemporary black and white street photography.” Take for example Abstract Brooklyn Bridge, 1970, which was also used as the cover for Camera 35 magazine the same year. “Here he takes a New York icon and imagines it unlike any tourist snapshot,” Robert says. “This kaleidoscope-like image was created without digital manipulation. It was done in a pre-digital, pre-Photoshop world by taking one picture, rewinding the film, and then exposing another on the same piece of 35mm Kodachrome emulsion. It’s a little movie in a still image.” Mitchell Funk used this unusual, manual technique of making a static but moving image using multiple exposures on color film extensively in the early 1970s, resulting in some of his most complicated images. One of them is New York, 1970, in which multiple exposures and a layered, graphic use of color were used by the artist to transform an image of the side of a New York skyscraper, looking upwards, into a dizzying, abstract three- dimensional composition. “He pioneered this unique Photo-Cubist style of photography,” Robert Funk says, “which is abstract and representational at the same time.” Black Hippie Girl, Bethesda Fountain, 1969. Abstract Brooklyn Bridge, 1970.