Sometimes history sort of whitewashes a person’s reputation, rendering them a serious figure in their given field even though during their lifetime they would never have been thought of that way. And sometimes it happens fast! That’s the case with Miroslav Tichy, who was born November 20, 1926 in Czechoslovakia, and lived to be 84. He’s now regarded as a photographer, and dozens of international shows have featured his work — mostly posthumously, and never with his participation. When he was alive, he was mostly considered to be a shady character you wouldn’t want much to do with. In fact, if he was alive today and got caught practicing his art, he might be charged with stalking.
Tichy lived in a small town, and at first appeared to be on the path to becoming a conventional artist. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, but after the Czech government became communist, the government commanded art students to only depict human figures as workers in overalls. Tichy refused and quit. He spent some time in the military and may have been injured — afterward he lived on a disability pension. The government kept him under surveillance and took him to a psychiatric clinic on patriotic holidays — but that appears to have been more to make sure he was out of sight.
He began his photographic work in the late 1960s, but in an unusual way. He couldn’t (or possibly wouldn’t) afford cameras or film, so he made his own. He built cameras out of cans, cardboard tubes, and whatever other materials he could find, and was even able to construct telephoto lenses out of plastic. His cameras worked, but they certainly didn’t look like cameras. And that was his one of his advantages. He would wander around town, looking like a vagrant (he didn’t cut his hair and wore ragged clothes). Everybody seemed to think he was just an addled eccentric, and sometimes posed for his photos because they assumed he was just pretending his camera worked. But it did. He took up to 90 photos every day, mostly of women, and primarily without them knowing they were being photographed. In today’s parlance, he’d probably be called a creep or worse.
The town had a public swimming pool, which he was not allowed to visit, but he could stand outside the fence and take his “pretend” photos — which were, of course, real. He kept his photography a secret until 1981, when a former neighbor returned to the town. The neighbor was Roman Buxbaum, whose family had collected Tichy’s art back in the Academy days, and Buxbaum found out about the pictures. Tichy would hand him large bundles of them, which he’d printed himself in his homemade darkroom.
The technical quality of Tichy’s photos is pretty bad by most standards. His lenses were blurry, his cameras let in dust and lint, and his exposures were just approximate. But critics since about 2004 — which is about when Buxbaum made a documentary about Tichy and began work to get the photos known — have given them very high marks as “anti-modernist.” Tichy wasn’t too happy about the publicity, and tried to get Buxbaum to stop. But he had given Buxbaum the photos, and couldn’t really control how they were used after that.
You can see some of Tichy’s work, and one of his cameras (and you’ll see why his neighbors didn’t think it worked) at the website of the Tichy Ocean foundation.
