Published by Torst in 2004, *Jaromír Funke* is a 152-page monograph devoted to one of the central figures of Czech modernist photography. Funke (1896–1945) emerged as a leading presence in Czech photography during the 1920s and 1930s, when the medium’s relationship to abstraction, perception, and the constructed image was being decisively reconsidered.

Funke’s experiments begin with modest materials but refuse ordinary ways of seeing them. Bottles, plates, mirrors, light, and other unassuming elements become instruments for investigating form. Reflection and transparency unsettle spatial certainty; framing isolates unexpected geometries; illumination turns familiar objects into arrangements poised between description and abstraction. These devices are not incidental effects but a working vocabulary through which perception itself is placed under scrutiny.

The monographic format gives this practice a concentrated setting. Rather than treating modernism as a sequence of recognizable styles, the book directs attention to the precision of Funke’s decisions: where an edge enters the frame, how one plane interrupts another, and how light can make a solid object appear unstable. His photographs reward slow comparison, especially where recurring materials produce markedly different spatial and psychological results.

This first-edition paperback presents its material in English and Czech. For collectors concerned with the history of European modernism, photographic abstraction, or the development of the Czech avant-garde, its significance rests in that focused encounter with Funke’s methods. The volume offers a substantial point of entry into an artist for whom photography was neither passive record nor decorative experiment, but a disciplined means of constructing—and questioning—visual reality.