You may have read about Miroslav Tichý on other photo blogs; in any event, he is a recluse from the Czech Republic, a trained artist, who in his old age has become better known for his furtive photography made with a home-made camera.

 

 

His photographs are almost invariably images of women; as  his fellow countryman ( or woman) Jarka Hálková  wrote: “He used to hide in bushes and take pictures of unaware women and girls with his home-made cameras. Once developed they were thrown away and Tichý didn’t care about them anymore.”

 

 

Well, that needs a bit of amplification; once developed, Tichý would make a print of a negative, apparently rarely more than one, and then he would staple decorated cardboard to the prints as a frame, and often rework the images with pencil or pen. Some of the prints he’d keep in a box by his bed; others were thrown to the floor where they kept company with vermin and insects. And there they languished. numbering in the hundreds, if not the thousands, until the photographs came to the attention of a childhood friend. Their purpose, it seems fairly obvious, although few commentators dwell on this aspect, was to provide a lonely old man with sexual gratification.

 

 

 

In his younger days, Tichý attended an art academy and for a few years he had a successful life as a painter. But at some point, the artist suffered a “psychotic breakdown”, was institutionalized, and once free, renounced Socialist realist art, or maybe all art, and retreated to his home town of Kyjov, in the Czech Republic.

As he became older he became ever more eccentric, dressing in rags, and subsisting it was said on a gulag diet of little more than soup and potatoes. His one expense seemed to be film; exposing up to three rolls a day, using cameras and lenses cobbled together from discarded equipment, he prowled locations where women would gather – parks, pools, and the like -  in order make his secretive erotica usually without his subjects’ knowledge.

 

 

 

Some commentators have attributed his voyeurism to be deliberate acts of misogyny and others have suggested his life is a protest against the totalitarianism of the Czech Communist regime. I think the second premise is more likely; basically the Socialist government denied him the right to make the art the way he wanted so his rejection of the government took the form of a rejection of society. But I’m not as comfortable with the misogynist charge; if anything he seems to loves women but probably thinks he too old and shabby to approach them directly, and in the end is he any more voyeuristic than most men who photograph women? Why does the name of Jock Sturgis float into mind? To me his so-called misogyny is no more complicated than a lonely old recluse yearning for the comfort of women; in other words, a shy and possibly mentally disturbed man who takes surreptitious photographs of women, not to demean them, but to gratify his needs. Art does creep into this motivation; why else bother with the strangely calligraphic frames? Self-disgust also appears to be part of the psychological picture; witness the abandonment of many of the images. One might also attribute his image-making to the yearning of art itself; it is easy enough to cage your muse but art has a way of breaking free and there is no doubt in my mind that the poignant images move us like the best art. And finally, given the improbable chance of being recognized as an artist at his late age ( and condition), he readily took advantage of it. Perhaps he is not as mentally impaired as everyone seems to think: His rare pronouncements give hints of a canny mind lurking behind the bizarre lifestyle ; he has said of his work “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”



The world became aware pf Tichý’s ‘outsider’ art mostly through the efforts of a childhood friend, Roman Buxbaum, whose family had collected Tichý art while he was still a painter. With the aid of a caretaker-neighbor and the old man himself, Buxbaum began to collect the photography and by 2009 his efforts paid off handsomely: Tichý’s work had been shown in Seville, Zurich, Paris, Arles, and in February of 2010 the International Center of Photography in New York put on a Tichý show.

It is somehow not surprising that in 2009 the newly famous “stone-age photographer” decided to sever all connections with Roman Buxbaum, saying that Buxbaum had violated both his trust and copyright. And as far as I know, there it remains: an old perhaps mentally impaired man once again sinking into obscurity, besotted by private fantasies which have become quite public, not to mention lucrative, for a number of others, if not the artist himself. Perhaps he will resume his photography although it is doubtful; he is now 84 and has not picked up a camera for twenty-five years. Or maybe find another patron or reconcile with the zealous Buxbaum; nothing would surprise in this strange tale. In the best of worlds, an institution would find a home for his work and provide a sinecure for the artist in his remaining years, but sadly, we don’t live in the best of worlds.

 


Like most who come across Miroslav Tichý, I am conflicted: I am attracted by many of the photographs which are mysteriously beautiful yet I am unable to consider them without also considering the man who made the work.

One of my students said to me, imagine you knew nothing of the artist and all the pictures were well-exposed and printed wouldn’t they just be routine girly pictures? That’s the suspicion lurking behind the photographs ( not to mention suspicion of a fraud perpetuated by some imaginative art school students) but of course you can’t separate image from process; with these photographs it’s not how well they’re seen but how they’ve been altered by the mind of the artist; the ‘bad’ printing, the scratches, the torn paper, the crude frames, even the footprints of rats  give the work an unmistakable aura of thwarted desire.

A critic for the New York Times, Karen Rosenberg, summed up the speculation about the artist’s life and work by observing ” … No single [theory] quite captures the photographs’ uncanny fusion of eroticism, paranoia and deliberation.”  Tichý himself says ” “A mistake. That’s what makes the poetry.”  I’m happy to give him the last word.

 

 


UPDATE: Miroslav Tichý died on April 12, 2011. Thanks to Bill Crandall

for the notification.


All photographs by Miroslav Tichý.  Wikipedia’s entry on Tichý lists many sources as well as the titles of his books, some of which are available on Amazon.