How cameras assembled from trash brought glory to a vagrant photographer: Miroslav Tikhy

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

To creativity Czech photographer Miroslav Tychy, whose fate became one of the main legends in the history of art of the twentieth century, is now being treated with respect. But there was a time when he was considered a dissident, a mentally unbalanced person, an alcoholic, a vagabond and a hermit, and no one even suspected the existence of his works. Nevertheless, now he is a world famous photo artist, famous for his photographs, as well as cameras, which he created with his own hands, literally from trash.

Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011) for about forty years of his life did nothing but photograph women and girls. And he did it absolutely individually and amazingly. His photographic equipment was so unusual in its engineering design that now one can only be amazed, but then, half a century ago, no one could even think that he had a working camera in his hands.

The creative credo of the Czech photographer was his unusual outlook. - argued Miroslav Tikhy.

Biography pages

Miroslav Tikhy was born in 1926 in a small village in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, into the family of a clothing cutter and the daughter of a village headman. Having started drawing in early childhood, in 1946 he entered the Prague Academy of Arts. However, the political upheaval that took place in the country in 1948 radically changed the life of Miroslav. The academy began persecution of professors and students who did not support the communist government in the country. Due to the unhealthy situation at the university, Tikhiy stopped attending the academy. Was expelled and sent to military service in Slovakia.

But, persecuted by the communist regime, he was soon arrested. He was charged with dissent and subversion against the new government. And even when he was released, Tikhiy constantly felt close attention to his creative works not only from cultural officials, but also from the police. Persecuted by the regime, he soon turned into a "loser" with no prospects, no permanent job and no home.

People began to shy away from a man who, without fear of anyone, openly criticized the power of the communists. His inner desire to resist the totalitarian regime has never weakened. As a result, total control led Miroslav to a serious mental disorder, persecution mania and creative impotence.

In the 1960s, Miroslav Tikhiy stopped caring about his appearance, completely lost interest in drawing and painting, and began to take photographs. He drank a lot, disregarding the rules of decency, walked in rags, did not cut his hair, let go of his beard and lived in the open air. Thus, he expressed protest and complete rejection of social values and laws by which his compatriots lived. By the 70s, Tikhiy spent a total of eight years in prisons and a psychiatric clinic. The authorities viewed the independent Tikhy as a dissident and tried to keep not only under supervision, but also to “normalize” his behavior.

In the mid-70s, he rented himself a small closet. But living under a roof didn't change much. Quiet still did not really care about his life or appearance.

Unique cameras

He wandered and photographed a lot. Moreover, Tikhiy designed his cameras himself. Plywood, cardboard, drainage pipes, thread spools, children's telescopes, lenses from old glasses in his hands were transformed into a kind of primitive photographic equipment. Miroslav fastened all the details of his structures with glue and asphalt collected from the street. Lenses sometimes had to be ground out of ordinary plexiglass with sandpaper and polished with toothpaste.

Photography is the meaning of 40 years of the life of Miroslav Tikhiy

With his homemade apparatus, the man wandered the streets of his hometown and stealthily photographed girls and women. And he did it very quickly and imperceptibly, from a sufficiently large distance not to be noticed. Feminine nature became the main and only motive of his work. During his life, Tikhiy created countless photographs, the main characters of which were women. He filmed them walking through the streets, sitting on benches in parks, squares, swimming in pools, playing on sports grounds, sunbathing on the beaches. He photographed through the window of his closet, through fences, he photographed them in stores. In a word - wherever he could. Sometimes he could create up to a hundred pictures in a day.

Every day he returned to his home with a hundred photographs and printed them on the same primitive equipment, making always only one print from the chosen negative, blurry, hazy, filled with primitive impression. Then Miroslav deftly finished and decorated his pictures with a pencil. Sometimes he pasted a photo on cardboard, thereby creating a semblance of a frame., - from the memoirs of eyewitnesses.

He framed the best photographs. From paper bags, newspapers, book pages, drawings and cardboard, he made substrates that matched the color of the photographs. After that, he painted them with paints or colored pencils, or even just a ballpoint pen.

He created his art, pushed by an obsession and a passion for peeping, he filmed exclusively for himself, not believing that someone would ever see his work, let alone buy. However, thanks to longtime friend Roman Buxbaum in the late 1990s, the general public became aware of Tikhiy.

A few years later, the famous curator of contemporary art, Harold Zeeman, while Miroslav was still alive, arranged his personal exhibition of photographs at the Biennale in Seville in the summer of 2004, which brought the photographer the Discovery of the Year award. Quiet then was 78 years old. A year later, a retrospective of his work was held at the Kunsthaust Museum (Zurich). Then his photographs were shown in exhibition halls in New York, Berlin and London. However, Miroslav Tikhy never changed his way of life, sudden popularity and fame were indifferent to him - he did not go to exhibitions, believing that

A lot of time has passed since the photographs of Miroslav Tikhiy saw the world. Now he is in fashion and quite popular. Contemporary collectors and art critics speak of him as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. The cost of some of Miroslav's photographs today reaches 12,000 euros.

The deliberate contempt for photographic purity in the works of this original master is now perceived by many not as a disadvantage, but as an increase in sensuality. The female images of the Quiet emerge from the soft impressionist light. Beauty becomes a dream …

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