I make something, then I photograph it. I was going to name this image "Girl from Ipanema" but the location is Copacabana. So I opted for a less witty name. I am photographing my own painting. The legs are an oil on canvas painting that I did. I mounted it on masonite and silhouetted it. It is about 40 image in length. I painted it in New York, packed it in a suitcase and then strutted down to Rio. An extreme close up yields a radical composition for the time. In the upper thigh area, you see the texture of the canvas and the reflection of light off of it. As the eye works it way down the painting, for a moment it becomes some what real reinforcing the dual nature of the work as object and image. Robert Funk is a pioneer of Staged Photography with works going back to 1972. He was widely published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.