Miroslav Tichý
Encyclopedia
Miroslav Tichý was a photographer who from the 1960s to 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov
in the Czech Republic
, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware they are being photographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sighted him, perhaps not realizing that the parody of a camera he carried was real.
His soft focus
, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spotted and badly printed — flawed by the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add poetic imperfections.
Of his technical methods, he has said, "First of all, you have to have a bad camera", and, "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."
During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Tichý was considered a dissident
and badly treated.
His photographs remained largely unknown until an exhibition was held for him in 2004. Tichý did not attend exhibitions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and freedom from the standards of society.
Tichý died on April 12, 2011 in Kyjov.
), Czechoslovakia
. He was an introverted child who did well in school.
Although Tichý is regarded today as an outsider art
ist because of his unconventional approach to photography, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts
in Prague
, and for a time seemed on the path to becoming an esteemed painter in the modernist mode, working in a style reminiscent of Josef Čapek
.
After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia
in 1948, students at the Academy were required to work in the Socialist
mode, drawing workers in overalls rather than female models. Tichý refused, stopped working and quit the Academy. He was then required to perform his compulsory military service
.
When he returned to Kyjov, he lived with his parents on a small disability pension, and painted and drew for himself in his own style. The Communist regime in its paranoia saw the independent Tichý as a dissident
, kept him under surveillance and tried to "normalize" him, bringing him to the State psychiatric clinic for a few days on Communist patriotic holidays such as May Day
to keep him out of the public eye. In the 1960s he began to disregard his personal appearance, wearing a ragged suit and letting his unkempt hair and beard grow long. At about this time he began to wander around town with an intentionally imperfect homemade camera, taking clandestine photographs of local women.
Following the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, private property was nationalized. In 1972, Tichý was evicted from his studio, his work thrown into the street. He stopped drawing and painting and concentrated only on photography, working in the disorderly conditions of his home. Of the transition, he says, "The paintings were already painted, the drawings drawn. What was I supposed to do? I looked for new media. With the help of photography I saw everything in a new light. It was a new world."
In 1985, Tichý stopped making his photographs and again concentrated on drawing.
His non-photographic body of work includes 100 to 200 oil paintings and a vast number of drawings. As with his photographs, in the past he destroyed an unknown number of such works.
regarded as an eccentric. He shot about 90 pictures a day,
returning to his disordered home to develop and print them.
Homemade telephoto lenses allowed him to work unnoticed at a distance from his subjects. He frequented the streets, the bus station, the main square, the park across from the town swimming pool, stealing intimate glimpses of the women of Kyjov.
Although he was not permitted to go to the pool, he could photograph undisturbed through the wire fence.
The fence often appears in his pictures, its presence adding a suggestion of forbidden fruit.
According to a review by R. Wayne Parsons published in The New York Photo Review,
Tichý's pictures were created for his own viewing pleasure, not for sale or exhibition. Each negative was printed only once.
Technically, his pictures are full of mistakes that compound the built-in
limitations of his equipment — underexposed or overexposed, out of focus, blemished by dust in the camera, stained by careless darkroom processing.
Tichý explains, "A mistake. That's what makes the poetry."
A typical camera might be constructed from plywood, sealed from the light with road asphalt, with a plywood shutter with a window cut through, operated by a pulley system of thread spools and dressmaker's elastic.
A homemade telephoto lens
might be constructed from cardboard tubes or plastic pipes. He made his own lenses, cutting them out of Plexiglas, sanding them with sandpaper, then polishing with a mix of toothpaste and cigarette ashes. His enlarger
combines sheet metal, two fence slats, a light bulb and a tin can.
, Tichý might scissor off unwanted parts to improve the composition
. Particularly successful images were pasted onto cardboard, or backed with other paper to prevent curling. He often drew lines with a pen or pencil to reinforce the subject's contours, or to heighten an image's expressiveness. He might decorate the margins with hand-drawn designs.
In 1981, Roman Buxbaum, a former neighbor befriended by Tichý when Buxbaum was a child, returned from exile in Switzerland. His family had long been owners of paintings and drawings by Tichý, and now Buxbaum discovered the photographic work, which had been kept a secret.
Buxbaum began an effort to collect and preserve the artist's deteriorating photographs. He says that over the next 25 years it was his good fortune to be the only person to see, collect and document Tichý's work. Tichý made him presents of bundles of photographs, and Buxbaum bought more bundles from Tichý's neighbor and "surrogate mother", Jana Hebnarovà, who has looked after Tichý since his mother's death and been appointed his heir. In 2006, Buxbaum said that he believed his to be the most complete collection of Tichý's photographs, and that he had placed part of it with galleries for sale on commission, with the intention of making it available to museums and collectors to "bequeath it to the world of art".
In 2009, it was announced that Tichý had severed all ties with Buxbaum and the Tichý Oceàn Foundation's website. In a notarized statement dated 22 January 2009, Tichý states that he made no agreement, written or oral, with Buxbaum to propagate his works, that Buxbaum exploits his works without authorization and violates his copyright, and that only he, Hebnarovà and his lawyer have the right to decide on the use and propagation of his works.
he made a documentary about the artist's work and life, Miroslav Tichý: Tarzan Retired (2004). Tichý's work was largely unknown until Buxbaum's collection of his photographs was shown at the 2004 Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville. Tichý's work won the Rencontres d'Arles
2005 New Discovery Award, and Buxbaum set up the Tichý Oceàn Foundation on behalf of Tichý, then 77, to preserve and exhibit his work. In 2005, he had a major retrospective
at the Kunsthaus
in Zurich, another at the Pompidou Centre in 2008.
In February 2010, Tichý had a solo show at the International Center of Photography
in New York City. In its review, The New York Times thought his anti-modernist style was representative of the nonviolent subversion practiced by Czech students and artists under the Soviet regime, and called his photographs an "uncanny fusion of eroticism, paranoia and deliberation" that is "mildly disturbing [but also] intensely fascinating".
describes Tichý as "practically reinventing photography from scratch", rehabilitating the soft focus
, manipulated pictorial photography
of the late 1800s,
Director Radek Horacek of the Brno House of Art, which held an exhibition of Tichy's photographs in 2006, describes them thus:
Kyjov (Hodonín District)
Kyjov is a town in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. It has around 12,000 inhabitants. Kyjov is famous for its folk festival which takes place every four years.The villages Bohuslavice, Boršov and Nětčice are administrative parts of Kyjov....
in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware they are being photographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sighted him, perhaps not realizing that the parody of a camera he carried was real.
His soft focus
Soft focus
In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while retaining sharp edges; it is not the same as an...
, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spotted and badly printed — flawed by the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add poetic imperfections.
Of his technical methods, he has said, "First of all, you have to have a bad camera", and, "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."
During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Tichý was considered a dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
and badly treated.
His photographs remained largely unknown until an exhibition was held for him in 2004. Tichý did not attend exhibitions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and freedom from the standards of society.
Tichý died on April 12, 2011 in Kyjov.
Early life
Miroslav Tichý was born in 1926 in the village of Nětčice, part of the town of Kyjov (now South Moravian RegionSouth Moravian Region
South Moravian Region is an administrative unit of the Czech Republic, located in the south-western part of its historical region of Moravia, with exception of Jobova Lhota, that belongs to Bohemia. Its capital is Brno the 2nd largest city of the Czech Republic. The region is famous for its wine...
), Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
. He was an introverted child who did well in school.
Although Tichý is regarded today as an outsider art
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...
ist because of his unconventional approach to photography, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
The Academy of Fine Arts, Prague was founded in 1799 and is the Czech Republic's oldest art college. The school offers twelve Master's degree programs and one Doctoral program.-History:...
in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, and for a time seemed on the path to becoming an esteemed painter in the modernist mode, working in a style reminiscent of Josef Čapek
Josef Capek
Josef Čapek was a Czech artist who was best known as a painter, but who was also noted as a writer and a poet. He invented the word robot, which was introduced into literature by his brother, Karel Čapek.- Biography :...
.
After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948
The Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 – in Communist historiography known as "Victorious February" – was an event late that February in which the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, with Soviet backing, assumed undisputed control over the government of Czechoslovakia, ushering in over four decades...
in 1948, students at the Academy were required to work in the Socialist
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
mode, drawing workers in overalls rather than female models. Tichý refused, stopped working and quit the Academy. He was then required to perform his compulsory military service
Conscription
Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
.
When he returned to Kyjov, he lived with his parents on a small disability pension, and painted and drew for himself in his own style. The Communist regime in its paranoia saw the independent Tichý as a dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
, kept him under surveillance and tried to "normalize" him, bringing him to the State psychiatric clinic for a few days on Communist patriotic holidays such as May Day
May Day
May Day on May 1 is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and usually a public holiday; it is also a traditional spring holiday in many cultures....
to keep him out of the public eye. In the 1960s he began to disregard his personal appearance, wearing a ragged suit and letting his unkempt hair and beard grow long. At about this time he began to wander around town with an intentionally imperfect homemade camera, taking clandestine photographs of local women.
Following the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, private property was nationalized. In 1972, Tichý was evicted from his studio, his work thrown into the street. He stopped drawing and painting and concentrated only on photography, working in the disorderly conditions of his home. Of the transition, he says, "The paintings were already painted, the drawings drawn. What was I supposed to do? I looked for new media. With the help of photography I saw everything in a new light. It was a new world."
In 1985, Tichý stopped making his photographs and again concentrated on drawing.
His non-photographic body of work includes 100 to 200 oil paintings and a vast number of drawings. As with his photographs, in the past he destroyed an unknown number of such works.
Approach to photography
During the years he wandered through Kyjov taking photographs with his crude cameras, the tall, shabby Tichý was tolerated by the townspeople butregarded as an eccentric. He shot about 90 pictures a day,
returning to his disordered home to develop and print them.
Homemade telephoto lenses allowed him to work unnoticed at a distance from his subjects. He frequented the streets, the bus station, the main square, the park across from the town swimming pool, stealing intimate glimpses of the women of Kyjov.
Although he was not permitted to go to the pool, he could photograph undisturbed through the wire fence.
The fence often appears in his pictures, its presence adding a suggestion of forbidden fruit.
According to a review by R. Wayne Parsons published in The New York Photo Review,
- We see women photographed from the rear, from the front, from the side; we see their feet, legs, buttocks, backs, faces, as well as complete bodies [as when drawing a nude at the Academy]; we see them walking, standing, sitting, bending over, reclining. There are a few nudes, though the poor image quality sometimes makes it difficult to determine if we are looking at a nude or a woman with not much on. [...] Whatever eroticism is present is limited to that of the voyeur; these women are not inviting us into their world.
Tichý's pictures were created for his own viewing pleasure, not for sale or exhibition. Each negative was printed only once.
Artistic aspects
Tichý's subtle photographs use themes of movement, composition and contrast, but the main theme is an obsession with the female body.Technically, his pictures are full of mistakes that compound the built-in
limitations of his equipment — underexposed or overexposed, out of focus, blemished by dust in the camera, stained by careless darkroom processing.
Tichý explains, "A mistake. That's what makes the poetry."
Equipment
Tichý made his equipment from materials at hand.A typical camera might be constructed from plywood, sealed from the light with road asphalt, with a plywood shutter with a window cut through, operated by a pulley system of thread spools and dressmaker's elastic.
A homemade telephoto lens
Telephoto lens
In photography and cinematography, a telephoto lens is a specific type of a long-focus lens in which the physical length of the lens is shorter than the focal length. This is achieved by incorporating a special lens group known as a telephoto group that extends the light path to create a long-focus...
might be constructed from cardboard tubes or plastic pipes. He made his own lenses, cutting them out of Plexiglas, sanding them with sandpaper, then polishing with a mix of toothpaste and cigarette ashes. His enlarger
Enlarger
An enlarger is a specialized transparency projector used to produce photographic prints from film or glass negatives using the gelatin silver process, or from transparencies.-Construction:...
combines sheet metal, two fence slats, a light bulb and a tin can.
Printing and mounting
Once a picture was printedPhotographic printing
Photographic printing is the process of producing a final image on paper for viewing, using chemically sensitized paper. The paper is exposed to a photographic negative, a positive transparency , or a digital image file projected using an enlarger or digital exposure unit such as a LightJet printer...
, Tichý might scissor off unwanted parts to improve the composition
Composition (visual arts)
In the visual arts – in particular painting, graphic design, photography and sculpture – composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art or a photograph, as distinct from the subject of a work...
. Particularly successful images were pasted onto cardboard, or backed with other paper to prevent curling. He often drew lines with a pen or pencil to reinforce the subject's contours, or to heighten an image's expressiveness. He might decorate the margins with hand-drawn designs.
Conservation
The works were unnumbered, untitled and undated. Tichý kept no catalogue and had no room to properly store his negatives or prints. Once he had printed a picture, it was cast aside, dropped haphazardly about his home, exposed to dirt and damage, rats and insects.In 1981, Roman Buxbaum, a former neighbor befriended by Tichý when Buxbaum was a child, returned from exile in Switzerland. His family had long been owners of paintings and drawings by Tichý, and now Buxbaum discovered the photographic work, which had been kept a secret.
Buxbaum began an effort to collect and preserve the artist's deteriorating photographs. He says that over the next 25 years it was his good fortune to be the only person to see, collect and document Tichý's work. Tichý made him presents of bundles of photographs, and Buxbaum bought more bundles from Tichý's neighbor and "surrogate mother", Jana Hebnarovà, who has looked after Tichý since his mother's death and been appointed his heir. In 2006, Buxbaum said that he believed his to be the most complete collection of Tichý's photographs, and that he had placed part of it with galleries for sale on commission, with the intention of making it available to museums and collectors to "bequeath it to the world of art".
In 2009, it was announced that Tichý had severed all ties with Buxbaum and the Tichý Oceàn Foundation's website. In a notarized statement dated 22 January 2009, Tichý states that he made no agreement, written or oral, with Buxbaum to propagate his works, that Buxbaum exploits his works without authorization and violates his copyright, and that only he, Hebnarovà and his lawyer have the right to decide on the use and propagation of his works.
Recognition
As part of Buxbaum's conservation efforts,he made a documentary about the artist's work and life, Miroslav Tichý: Tarzan Retired (2004). Tichý's work was largely unknown until Buxbaum's collection of his photographs was shown at the 2004 Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville. Tichý's work won the Rencontres d'Arles
Rencontres d'Arles
The Rencontres d'Arles is a summer festival of photography, founded in 1970 by the photographer Lucien Clergue, the writer Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette. It takes place between July and September in Arles, a town in Provence, southern France.The festival shows mostly new...
2005 New Discovery Award, and Buxbaum set up the Tichý Oceàn Foundation on behalf of Tichý, then 77, to preserve and exhibit his work. In 2005, he had a major retrospective
Retrospective
Retrospective generally means to take a look back at events that already have taken place. For example, the term is used in medicine, describing a look back at a patient's medical history or lifestyle.-Music:...
at the Kunsthaus
Kunsthaus Zürich
The Kunsthaus Zürich houses one of the most important art museums in Switzerland and Europe, collected by the local Kunstverein, called Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, and holdings running from the Middle Ages to contemporary art, with an emphasis on Swiss art.Kunsthaus is also the name of the tram stop...
in Zurich, another at the Pompidou Centre in 2008.
In February 2010, Tichý had a solo show at the International Center of Photography
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...
in New York City. In its review, The New York Times thought his anti-modernist style was representative of the nonviolent subversion practiced by Czech students and artists under the Soviet regime, and called his photographs an "uncanny fusion of eroticism, paranoia and deliberation" that is "mildly disturbing [but also] intensely fascinating".
Critical interpretation
An essay in Artforum InternationalArtforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
describes Tichý as "practically reinventing photography from scratch", rehabilitating the soft focus
Soft focus
In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while retaining sharp edges; it is not the same as an...
, manipulated pictorial photography
Pictorialism
Pictorialism is the name given to a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism...
of the late 1800s,
- ...not as a distortion of the medium but as something like its essence. What counts for him is not only the image – just one moment in the photographic process – but also the chemical activity of the materials, which is never entirely stable or complete, and the delimitation of the results via cropping and framing.
Director Radek Horacek of the Brno House of Art, which held an exhibition of Tichy's photographs in 2006, describes them thus:
- They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realize that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichy managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichy but his photographs are different. A woman's tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious.
External links
- Official Miroslav Tichý site including images
- Tichý Oceàn Foundation site including images
- Miroslav Tichý: Tarzan Retired an article by Roman Buxbaum
- Exhibition: Miroslav Tichý at Michael Hoppen Gallery, London several images
- Tichý photographs several images at cirkusworld.com
- Der globalisierte Clochard article with several images, in German
- Video: Miroslav Tichy Quicktime, about 4 minutes, in Czech
- Jihomoravske venuse - South Moravian Venuses - video ( 2010 )