Landscape near Kutna Hora (Kuttenberg) 1939

Jaromír Funke made this gelatin silver print, Landscape near Kutna Hora (Kuttenberg), sometime in the first half of the 20th century. What strikes me about this piece is the way Funke coaxes a whole symphony of tones from what is essentially a monochrome palette, creating a composition that's both graphic and deeply atmospheric. Look at the way the light rakes across the undulating landscape, emphasizing the texture of the grass and soil. There's a lovely tension between the geometric precision of the terraces and the organic forms of the hills, a push and pull that keeps the eye moving. Those little trees marching down the hillside feel like punctuation marks, adding rhythm and a touch of the surreal. Funke’s work reminds me a bit of some of the early modernist landscape painters like Charles Sheeler, who were also interested in finding abstract beauty in industrial and agricultural forms. It's this tension between abstraction and representation, this embrace of ambiguity, that makes art so endlessly fascinating.