Photography Appreciation
Miroslav Tichý was born on November 20, 1926 in Nětčice (then part of Kyjov in Moravia, Czechoslovakia). He grew up in a provincial setting, the son of a tailor, and after World War II he traveled to Prague to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts, pursuing a path in painting and drawing. But his time at the Academy proved fraught: after the Communist regime took power in 1948, the art establishment shifted toward socialist realism, and Tichý resisted its constraints. He left formal training, returned to Kyjov, and lived a largely solitary life under surveillance and occasional psychiatric confinement, keeping mostly to his own artistic impulses.
Tichý’s photographic method was unconventional, intimate, and (by design) technically “imperfect.” Between the 1960s and mid-1980s, he roamed his hometown and neighboring areas photographing women—often unaware of the camera—using devices he built from cardboard, tin cans, plexiglass, rubber bands, and other found materials.
Tichý ground and polished makeshift lenses with toothpaste and cigarette ash, cut shutters and frames from scrap wood, and sealed housings with tar or asphalt. The resulting images are often soft, blurry, spotted, under- or overexposed, and subject to processing flaws or dust artifacts—effects Tichý embraced rather than avoided, seeing “mistake” as poetic.
He frequently trimmed, collaged, or drew into prints to heighten contours and expressiveness. Recognition for Tichý’s work came late, often shaped by curators who framed his life as outsider art. His photography remained little known until the early 2000s, when Roman Buxbaum, a former neighbor, helped preserve and promote his works.
In 2004, Tichý’s works appeared at the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville; soon after, he won the 2005 Rencontres d’Arles New Discovery Award, and major exhibits followed in Zurich, Paris (Centre Pompidou), and New York (ICP). Critics often interpret his photographs as a subversive aesthetic of imperfection, merging eroticism, voyeurism, and decay.
Sources:
Wikipedia
https://brooklynrail.org/2010/06/artseen/miroslav-tich
https://www.icp.org/news/in-memory-of-miroslav-tich%C3%BD-1926%E2%80%932011
https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/88-miroslav-tichy/
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/miroslav-tich%C3%BD
https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/miroslav-tichy
https://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3430
https://tichyocean.com/en/miroslav-tichy/biography/
https://christianberst.com/en/artists/miroslav-tichy
https://www.smith-davidson.com/artists/222-miroslav-tichy/biography
https://saint-lucy.com/essays/miroslav-tichy
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