The Long Run
The problem with great success at an early age is, what do you do next? Mitchell Funk didn't have to worry about it all that much. He didn't need to shift gears, reinvent himself or chase the marketplace. His style and mastery of color photography has been a long-running artistic and commercial success.
Mitchell had his first feature article in Popular Photography magazine when he was twenty; his first exhibit at the same age. He got an agent at 21 and was selling stock photography in the days when stock agencies were rare.
"It all happened so fast," he says. "I was just out of high school and not sure I was going to go to college. I needed a job. Someone told me you could go door to door with one of those twin-lens reflex cameras and do baby photography, so I got a strobe and a camera and started shooting." He made some money, got an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and a new job in a medical center doing black-and-white lab photography. And when he started showing his portfolio of personal color photography, he immediately started getting assignments. Thirty-seven years later, he's still at it.
His interest in photography might have come in part from his father, who was a photographer and a painter, but he has a memory of seeing a copy of a Popular Photography color annual that featured infrared color. "I was a teenager, and it caught my eye. I didn't know you could do that with photography."
Mitchell's career is marked by countless photography magazine articles, record album covers, film posters (he created the signature image for Ken Russell's film of the Who's Tommy), editorial illustrations and covers for Time, Life, Newsweek and Fortune, annual reports, stock sales and commercial assignments for clients like IBM, AT&T and General Motors.
His signature is, of course, brilliant use of brilliant color. There's some image manipulation involved, but often it's not as much as you might think. In the past there was a lot of use of slide duplicators and filters, a lot of in-camera multiple exposures and image composites. These days Photoshop is the tool Mitchell uses when he wants to enhance color or clean up an image by removing or changing the position of items and objects. But what really marks his images, past and present, is his patient, painstaking pursuit of exactly the right light.
"I scout around a lot, trying to find areas where I can photograph, places that have potential," he says. "Then I go back to those areas a number of times—five, ten, 15, even 20 times to find the perfect light."
One of those areas was New York City's Times Square. "About ten years ago, when they were turning 42nd Street into Disneyland, they boarded up all the porn shops and old movie theatres with these brightly colored metal doors and wood panels," Mitchell says. "I saw it from the backseat of a cab, and I thought, I gotta get back here. I have to shoot that. But it was almost impossible—the traffic never abates on 42nd Street. It's endlessly moving, and you can't get a clean moment. I went back maybe a dozen times when the light was right, usually in late afternoon, and finally I got it, a break in the traffic."
The result is the seventh photo you see here. "Those colors are the colors I saw," Mitchell says. "They're the reason I kept going back. That's my type of photography. That picture is all about the light hitting those colors. Shoot on an overcast day and it doesn't have that vibrant, eye-popping color. It's that light, that four or five in the afternoon light, that makes it work. Maybe I had a half-hour of that light, and I spent most of it, day after day, waiting for a break in the traffic. I'll tell you, I shot a lot of film to get that picture."
While his photography begins with observation, it ends with dedication. "When I see something with potential—because of light and color— I'll keep going back over and over again until I find that magical moment of light. Sometimes I get lucky."
Mitchell is careful to tell you that the colors in his photographs are colors that are there; they are not created afterward. "The film or the digital file has the light and the color in it," he says. "I'm not pumping up curves or hue or saturation. I may do a little work with the color—add a little saturation to a specific color or a selected area. And sometimes I'll reposition things, take things out or replace things. But half the shots are straight out of the camera or right from the film."
He calls his results "controlled grab photography"—as in grabbing moments and exercising control by deciding when to grab them. "If I see that the light isn't right, I'll keep coming back until it is."
And sometimes the light is not the only thing he's waiting for. Sometimes the composition needs a key element. Mitchell tells of one photo in which the light was perfect, but not enough was happening—until a man walking his dog entered the frame.
What he's most interested in these days are two cities, New York and San Francisco. He's set out to create images that capture their character and compile those images into two books.
"There's much less character to New York these days," he says. "They've broken it all down in the last decade, so it's hard to find street corners that don't have parking garages or new apartment houses. San Francisco still has a lot of character, but it's losing it, too. It's an especially challenging place for the kind of photography I do just because it's physically demanding walking those hills with a loaded camera bag. But I get up early in the morning and work into the early evening and sometimes I find it. And if I don't find it, I'll go back the next day—or the next year, or two. I've gone back to specific places five years later to get the effect I wanted."
Mitchell has taken time out from his commercial work to concentrate on the cities project. "I can't stop shooting because a lot of these buildings and neighborhoods are going to be torn down and expensive apartment houses put up."
And that's when he mentions the one regret he has about his career. "I might have spent too much time experimenting and working with the tools of color photography—with the filters and prisms and duplicators. Those were the photos that were selling at the time, and I became known for that, but all the time I really was a light guy, looking for the beautiful moments and times of day, for fog, atmosphere, light play. That's what I'm seeking in the cities now."
The Collector
Mitchell is currently shooting with a D2x , an F6 and an F5, but on his shelves and in his camera bags are over 30 Nikons, going back to the original F. "I'm practically a collector," he says. Until the introduction of the D2X and the F6, four F5s were his everyday cameras. With that many camera bodies, you can imagine his storehouse of lenses, but the ones most likely to be in heavy rotation are five Zoom-Nikkors: 12-24mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S Zoom-Nikkor, 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor, 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor and 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED AF VR Zoom-Nikkor. His film choices include Fuji's Velvia and, occasionally, Provia; and Kodak's E100 VS and E100G. He'll carry 15 to 20 rolls at a time, and since starting to shoot digital, at least five, high-capacity memory cards. "I shoot a lot," he says.
