The Hermit of Kyjov
October 2007
Miroslav Tichý, an eccentric, reclusive Czech artist, was nearly 80 when he won the New Discovery Award at Arles in 2005, but he’d only recently allowed his photographs out into a world he still doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in. Paintings that were considered "subversive" by the Communists landed him in prison and a series of psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s; since then, continuing surveillance and harassment by the police, which he has met by stubborn, principled defiance, cemented his "outsider" status.
It’s inevitable that the label would be applied to his art as well. Over the past two decades, using cameras he’s patched together from scavenged materials (spools, bottle caps, rubber bands, cardboard tubes), Tichý has made hundreds of pictures (he claims to have set himself the goal of 100 exposures a day), only to leave them scattered about a tumbledown house in the village of Kyjov that once housed his father’s tailor shop. Given the equipment and the circumstances, it’s no surprise that Tichý’s photographs are a mess: not just over- or underexposed, out of focus and haphazardly composed, but variously stained, scratched, mottled, mangled, eroded and full of fingerprints. They look like they’ve been stepped on or left in the dirt—and in many cases they probably have.
These signs of carelessness and willful neglect have come to define Tichý’s work. "The flaws are part of it," he insists. "That’s the poetry." But this grungy patina wouldn’t mean a thing if the images themselves weren’t so haunting, so extraordinary. Tichý’s pictures dispense with the niceties of craft in order to get direct access to the photographer’s subconscious and channel the results—feverish, dreamy, sensuous, intoxicated. In virtually all of them, the subject is a woman, an ordinary woman, getting out of her car, strolling down the street, chatting with friends, perched on a park bench, sunbathing, shopping, turning, stooping, oblivious. Like so many photographers who work on the street or the public square, from Garry Winogrand to Robert Frank to Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tichý prefers to remain anonymous and invisible. This isn’t always possible. Rumpled, unwashed, unshaven and missing most of his teeth (he looks like a down-and-out version of Roy Rogers’s sidekick Gabby Hayes), Tichý can hardly pass unnoticed in his hometown, so much of his work is done quickly, surreptitiously and from a good distance.
Yet there’s something startlingly intimate about what often appear to be grainy
surveillance shots. This is not the work of some sleazy Peeping Tom. Although Tichý tends to focus on exposed flesh (women lazing around the town pool are a favorite subject), his pictures aren’t vulgar; they’re affectionate and amused, helplessly smitten. "I am an observer," Tichý says, "observing as thoroughly as possible."
When Michael Hoppen mounted a show of Tichý’s photographs at his London gallery last spring, he paired him shrewdly with Jacques-Henri Lartigue. The occasion prompted David Bailey, another photographer with an eye for women, to talk about Tichý with the Sunday Times Magazine. Bailey, who called the Czech "a breath of fresh air," reeled off a series of provocative pronouncements: "All photographers are voyeurs," "[Tichý is] obsessive—all the good people are." "Good art has nothing to do with technique." But when he amplified this last point, he hit on something crucial. Tichý "got rid of the photography," he said. "There is no technique; you don’t feel the camera." (He also describes the Tichý photo he prizes: "an oddity" that includes a fly that had strayed onto the enlarger.)
The immediacy (and the happy accident) Bailey described is seductive on its own, but the work’s uniqueness adds to its appeal. Not only is every print one of a kind, but many of them come with hand-drawn "frames," some comically baroque, and in a number of cases Tichý has gone over the photos with pencil to emphasize or alter a line. Hoppen, who says his first encounter with Tichý was "love at first sight," is particularly taken with the work’s remarkable "object quality." Which might explain why it finds enthusiastic buyers (at prices that range from £4,700 to £8,250 or roughly $9,300 to $17,000) among drawing and painting collectors as well as among photography buffs. (Hoppen compares Tichý’s dreamy fog to Gerhard Richter’s memory blur.) But it’s only just begun: Tichý’s work is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert, and the Centre Pompidou has scheduled an exhibition for May through August 2008. New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery has just added nearly 100 works by Tichý to its museum-quality stock.
Asked how he got into photography, Tichý says, "All drawings have already been drawn. All paintings have already been painted. What was there left for me to do?" Tichý’s art of last resort has turned the hermit of Kyjov into a reluctant rising star.
Vince Aletti writes about photography and photographers in publications including the New Yorker, Aperture and Photoworks. His column on photo books appears in each issue of Photography.
It’s inevitable that the label would be applied to his art as well. Over the past two decades, using cameras he’s patched together from scavenged materials (spools, bottle caps, rubber bands, cardboard tubes), Tichý has made hundreds of pictures (he claims to have set himself the goal of 100 exposures a day), only to leave them scattered about a tumbledown house in the village of Kyjov that once housed his father’s tailor shop. Given the equipment and the circumstances, it’s no surprise that Tichý’s photographs are a mess: not just over- or underexposed, out of focus and haphazardly composed, but variously stained, scratched, mottled, mangled, eroded and full of fingerprints. They look like they’ve been stepped on or left in the dirt—and in many cases they probably have.
These signs of carelessness and willful neglect have come to define Tichý’s work. "The flaws are part of it," he insists. "That’s the poetry." But this grungy patina wouldn’t mean a thing if the images themselves weren’t so haunting, so extraordinary. Tichý’s pictures dispense with the niceties of craft in order to get direct access to the photographer’s subconscious and channel the results—feverish, dreamy, sensuous, intoxicated. In virtually all of them, the subject is a woman, an ordinary woman, getting out of her car, strolling down the street, chatting with friends, perched on a park bench, sunbathing, shopping, turning, stooping, oblivious. Like so many photographers who work on the street or the public square, from Garry Winogrand to Robert Frank to Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tichý prefers to remain anonymous and invisible. This isn’t always possible. Rumpled, unwashed, unshaven and missing most of his teeth (he looks like a down-and-out version of Roy Rogers’s sidekick Gabby Hayes), Tichý can hardly pass unnoticed in his hometown, so much of his work is done quickly, surreptitiously and from a good distance.
Yet there’s something startlingly intimate about what often appear to be grainy
surveillance shots. This is not the work of some sleazy Peeping Tom. Although Tichý tends to focus on exposed flesh (women lazing around the town pool are a favorite subject), his pictures aren’t vulgar; they’re affectionate and amused, helplessly smitten. "I am an observer," Tichý says, "observing as thoroughly as possible."
When Michael Hoppen mounted a show of Tichý’s photographs at his London gallery last spring, he paired him shrewdly with Jacques-Henri Lartigue. The occasion prompted David Bailey, another photographer with an eye for women, to talk about Tichý with the Sunday Times Magazine. Bailey, who called the Czech "a breath of fresh air," reeled off a series of provocative pronouncements: "All photographers are voyeurs," "[Tichý is] obsessive—all the good people are." "Good art has nothing to do with technique." But when he amplified this last point, he hit on something crucial. Tichý "got rid of the photography," he said. "There is no technique; you don’t feel the camera." (He also describes the Tichý photo he prizes: "an oddity" that includes a fly that had strayed onto the enlarger.)
The immediacy (and the happy accident) Bailey described is seductive on its own, but the work’s uniqueness adds to its appeal. Not only is every print one of a kind, but many of them come with hand-drawn "frames," some comically baroque, and in a number of cases Tichý has gone over the photos with pencil to emphasize or alter a line. Hoppen, who says his first encounter with Tichý was "love at first sight," is particularly taken with the work’s remarkable "object quality." Which might explain why it finds enthusiastic buyers (at prices that range from £4,700 to £8,250 or roughly $9,300 to $17,000) among drawing and painting collectors as well as among photography buffs. (Hoppen compares Tichý’s dreamy fog to Gerhard Richter’s memory blur.) But it’s only just begun: Tichý’s work is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert, and the Centre Pompidou has scheduled an exhibition for May through August 2008. New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery has just added nearly 100 works by Tichý to its museum-quality stock.
Asked how he got into photography, Tichý says, "All drawings have already been drawn. All paintings have already been painted. What was there left for me to do?" Tichý’s art of last resort has turned the hermit of Kyjov into a reluctant rising star.
Vince Aletti writes about photography and photographers in publications including the New Yorker, Aperture and Photoworks. His column on photo books appears in each issue of Photography.
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