An Outcast Miroslav Tichy Is Now In The Famous Photographer List
"One of those incredible stories.
A story about blurred, underexposed
photos and homemade cameras."
For a long time the Czech photographer and artist Miroslav Tichy
was wandering through his town, dressed in rags, and photographing
passing by women though the window or above the fence of a swimming
pool, in the streets, in the stores and parks... Every day he came home
with a hundred of shots and printed them using the primitive equipment,
making only one imprint from the chosen negative, which came out in the
blur and haze, filled by the simple impression.
He was considered a
hermit by his neighbours. But collectors and art critics think that he is one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century.
Miroslav Tichy
was born in the moravian village of Netzize, not far away from Brno, on
the 20th of November 1926. He studied art in the Prague Academy of Fine Arts
from 1945 to 1948. Being haunted by the communist regime of the Czech
Republic, Tichy spent seven years in prisons on the sabotage charge.
But he was accused only because he expressed his dissent with the regime. Shortly he
left the capital and became an inner emigrant.
Paintings and drawings from the time of study in the Academy were
mainly portraits and figures. He used to work from memory - his friends
often recalled that ability to reproduce features of a woman, which he
had seen in the street just for a moment, in a few strokes. Despite of
their simplicity, these portraits were catching the spirit of a woman.
In the latter works Tichy was still keeping to the idea of the women's
body, as well as to the style of the pre-war modernism, which he had
come across with in the Prague Academy, in the books and art magazines.
Having spent a lot of time in the studies of abstraction, painting and
art, Tichy started to learn photography. In the 1960 his first camera
was a simple field camera
, inherited from his father. The majority of his works were done in
1970-80. The film, photo paper and chemicals were bought in the local
drugstore. The dark room was constructed in the yard close to his
house. Later he made cameras out of cardboard tubes, thread spools,
rubber bands, and other similar things. Tichy rejected all the equipment
that was offered to him. The fact that he constructed everything by
his own hands demonstrated his independence. He refused from the modern
world comfort in order to become free from the necessity to satisfy its
requirements. It was a part of philosophy that he carried though his
life.
All his works were collecting dust and scattered all over his
house. Since Tichy has lost his studio he had to work in the quite
modest conditions at home. Living in the isolation, under the pressure
of outer obstacles, it was also difficult to find models. So he began
to go out, searching for them.
As a rule, Tichy kept his models at arm's
length. He photographed fast, without being noticed and from the far distance. "For me, woman is a leitmotif. A figure, standing, sitting or bending. A movement or gait. Nothing more interests me."
An intentional defiance to the photographic ideal of clearness in
Tichy's works is represented not as the drawback, but as the
strengthening of sensitivity. Feminine images reveal themselves out of
the soft impressionistic light miraculously. The essence of a woman is
expressed not with the help of realism and perfect technique, but with
the help of their denial.
The quality of his photographs Tichy compares with the true art:
"Photography
is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the
errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting.
And for that you need a camera as bad as possible! If you want to be
famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in
the whole world."
The years passed by and he was "discovered". Roman Buxbaum, a film director, artist and psychiatrist, was Tichy's neighbor and pupil
and since 1981 he began to make the documentary archive of the artist's
life and creative work. But only in 1989 Buxbaum could tell the world
about the outstanding hermit.
The
photographer Miroslav Tichy became known in the Czech Republic only
recently, after he achieved major success abroad. Now his photographs
are sold for thousands euros and he has solo exhibitions in galleries
of London, New York, Zurich and so on. Visitors and critics are
impressed with these photographs of poor technical quality but very
expressive.
Says Radek Horacek, the director of The Brno House of Art, where an exhibition of Tichy's photographs was held. "It
is like when an eleven years old boy falls in love, steals a photograph
of his classmate and cherishes it in his notebook. Tichy even sketched
on it, drew frames with a pen or a pencil. Some of the photographs were
taken from TV, some were just thrown here and there. Some romantics say
that there even are traces of mice nibbling at pictures in the
unbelievable mess."
Tichy has never
been out of the Czech Republic, never wanted to exhibit his works or,
all the more, to sell them. The artist says he's not going to visit any
of his exhibitions and if somebody wants he can come at the artist's place and
Tichy will show his works with a great pleasure.
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