Miroslav Tichý

Few stories in the history of photography are as astonishing and compelling as that of the octogenarian Czech photographer Miroslav TichyÌ. With crude homemade cameras fashioned out of cardboard and duct tape, TichyÌ took several thousand pictures of the women of his Moravian hometown of Kyjov throughout the 1960s and 70s. These pictures of women going about their daily business are at once banal and extraordinary, transforming the ordinary moments of work and leisure into small epiphanies. Blurred and off-kilter, his photographs have a striking contemporaneity, resembling the early paintings of Gerhard Richter or the photographs of Sigmar Polke. Printed imperfectly and deliberately battered, they evince a surprisingly retrograde or even antimodernist feeling, which, in the context of the Cold War atmosphere of provincial Czechoslovakia, just before and after the liberalizing moment of the Prague Spring (1968), undoubtedly constituted a kind of oblique political provocation, a nose-thumbing response to the progressive realist perfectionism of official Soviet culture. After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav TichyÌ (born 1926) withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic. In the late 1950s, he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogeneslike figure, in part as a political response to the social repressions of Czech communism. It is only in the past five years that his intensely private work has gained international public attention. Co-published with International Center of Photography, New York.