Photo Finish

I am in the midst of a couple of quieter days in the home office, just prior to the long holiday weekend. It’s a chance to catch up on paperwork and get a little better organized, hopefully to step back a bit and get some perspective on the bigger picture.

While in the process of clearing off my drawing board, in the hopes of actually using it for drawing, I came across some old brochures from art exhibits I had attended. One particularly caught my attention, entitled “again, serial practices in contemporary art.” This was largely a photography exhibit, but also included other media, and was on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, an exhibit in conjunction with The Cartin Collection. The exhibition took place back in the fall of 2007.

I recall several images from the exhibit, particularly some odd portraits and a large number of photos of electric chairs and the chambers that housed them. What struck me most was, off to the side, in a partially enclosed darkened area, a collection of small, almost crudely produced, and seemingly badly archived, portraits of women. This was the work of Miroslav Tichy, a Czech artist and photographer. For better or for worse, mostly for lacking the patience at museums and galleries, I tend to focus on the work and less on the write ups. I knew nothing of Miroslav Tichy, but attempted to decipher, for myself, what I was looking at. It appeared that none of these women were aware that they were being photographed. The artist loved the female form, to be sure. This was at the other end of the spectrum from fashion photography. It appeared that he had many busy days at the beach, stealth camera in hand, and many subsequent busy hours in the darkroom. Hours and minutes of private joy, no doubt.

I thought one photograph was particularly lovely, of a young woman, caught unawares, in all likelihood, walking home from a swim on a summer afternoon. She appeared quite relaxed, in bathing suit and top, and flush with a generous dose of vitamin D. Miroslav Tichy was at the ready, silently seizing the moment. Perhaps he used one of his homemade cameras fashioned from found materials, lenses having been cleaned with toothpaste and mounted in old toilet paper rolls. No viewfinder here, just point and shoot. Who knew?! The photo would be lovingly developed at home and custom printed. Later, he would often sketch right on the photograph enhancing it to his liking, and perhaps make one of his homemade frames, playfully decorating it with colored pencil or ink. This work was not produced for commercial success. This was the eccentric “artist in his own garden” at work. This was the work of a confirmed recluse and a political and social outcast.

Miroslav Tichy is in his mid eighties now and by all accounts his output has tapered considerably. The story has a peculiar twist near the end of his career, with his work being “discovered” sometime around 2005, widely exhibited and commanding big money. It is difficult to find much written about him except in blogs. He has no listing in Wikipedia as of this writing. When profiling his work, bloggers often begin by saying some such thing as, “where do I begin?!” He defies convention, in every sense of the word, and walks a fine line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. He sought to document his environment, and, I believe he succeeded.