Tuesday, 12 February 2013

Featured Photographer: Miroslav Tichy


Miroslav Tichý


" Women are just a motif to me. The fig­ure - stand­ing, bend­ing, or sit­ting. The move­ment, walk­ing. Noth­ing else Inter­ests me. The erot­ic is just a dream any­way. The world is only an illu­sion, our illu­sion. " - Miroslav Tichy


"Tichý says: “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 as bad a cam­era as pos­si­ble! If you want to be famous, you have to do what­ev­er you’re doing worse than any­one else in the whole world.”" - Roman Buxbaum
"Miroslav Tichý (Czech pronunciation: [cɪxiː]; Novem­ber 20, 1926 – April 12, 2011) was a pho­tog­ra­ph­er who from the 1960s until 1985 took thou­sands of sur­rep­ti­tious pic­tures of women in his home­town of Kyjov in the Czech Repub­lic, using home­made cam­eras con­struct­ed of card­board tubes, tin cans and other at-hand mate­ri­als. Most of his sub­jects were unaware they are being pho­tographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sight­ed him, per­haps not real­iz­ing that the par­o­dy of a cam­era he car­ried was real.
His soft focus, fleet­ing glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spot­ted and badly print­ed — flawed by the lim­i­ta­tions of his prim­i­tive equip­ment and a series of delib­er­ate pro­cess­ing mis­takes meant to add poet­ic imper­fec­tions.
Of his tech­ni­cal meth­ods, Tichy has said, "First of all, you have to have a bad cam­era", and, "If you want to be famous, you must do some­thing more badly than any­body in the entire world.
Dur­ing the Com­mu­nist regime in Czecho­slo­va­kia, Tichý was con­sid­ered a dis­si­dent and badly treat­ed by the gov­ern­ment. His pho­tographs remained large­ly unknown until an exhi­bi­tion was held for him in 2004. Tichý did not attend exhi­bi­tions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and free­dom from the stan­dards of soci­ety.
Tichý died on April 12, 2011 in Kyjov, Czech Republic." - Wikipedia

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