Miroslav Tichý

Biography

He made his lenses himself: he cut a lens out of Plexiglas, sanded it with sandpaper, then polished it with a mixture of toothpaste and cigarette ash. “Of course it worked,” he recalled, “only imprecisely, and that was the art.” This was how Miroslav Tichý made the optics for photographs that almost nobody knew about until his old age.

He was born on 20 November 1926 in Nětčice, which is now part of Kyjov. His father was a tailor, and from 1930 the family lived, with short interruptions, in Kyjov; Tichý finished secondary school there. By all accounts he was an introverted child, but he did well at school.

From 1945 to 1948 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, in the studio of Ján Želibský; the first year was preparatory. His classmates remembered his humour, his teachers his skill as a draughtsman. In the summer of 1948, soon after the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, he left the Academy. The reasons seem to have been both personal and political; by one account, he refused to draw workers in overalls instead of female models. Compulsory military service followed.

Back in Kyjov, he lived with his parents and worked for himself. In the 1950s he painted in oils, taking Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse as his models; such work was last shown in 1958 in Brno, at the exhibition “Art of Young Artists of Czechoslovakia”. After that he almost stopped painting and drew mainly women: several hundred drawings survive, and, by various estimates, between one and two hundred oil paintings. He destroyed some of his work, though how much is unknown.

His relations with the authorities were difficult. By his own account he spent eight years behind bars, but archival documents point to six months of pretrial detention. He was also held in psychiatric hospitals, among them Kroměříž, where he was taken against his will in April 1966. I would not rely on his stories without checking them; he readily changed them himself.

He took up photography at the end of the 1960s. In the 1970s he had to give up his studio in his family’s nationalised house, which was turned over to a production cooperative. “The paintings were already painted, the drawings drawn. What was I supposed to do?” he said later. He built his cameras and enlargers from plywood, tin cans, beer-bottle caps, spectacle lenses and telescope lenses, and worked the shutter with thread spools and dressmaker’s elastic.

He photographed almost only women: in the streets, at the bus station, in the main square, and at the town swimming pool, which he was not allowed to enter and from which he shot through the wire fence. He hid the camera under his sweater, pulled it out quickly and pressed the release without looking through the viewfinder, so as, in his words, “to hit even a swallow in flight”. He cut 60 mm film in half, trimmed his prints with scissors, outlined the contours in pencil, pasted them onto cardboard and decorated the margins with drawings. The frames came out overexposed or underexposed, out of focus, scratched. “A mistake,” he said, “that is what makes the poetry.” Each negative was printed once. He had a quota of pictures for each day and for years ahead, and once he had met it he stopped: around 1985, by other accounts in the early 1990s, he gave up photography and went back to drawing.

His work lay around the house, was trodden on, gathered dust and was gnawed by mice. He had no intention of exhibiting and lived very frugally, wearing the same patched suit and never cutting his hair.

He became known thanks to a former neighbour, the psychiatrist and artist Roman Buxbaum, who collected a large part of the photographs in the late 1990s. The exhibitions were prepared without Tichý’s consent, and in his last years he had no contact with Buxbaum. His first solo show took place in 2004 at the Seville Biennial; in 2005 there was a retrospective at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, and at Rencontres d’Arles he won the Discovery Award. In 2006 his first exhibition in the Czech Republic opened at the House of Art in Brno, and the composer Michael Nyman came and gave a concert. Later came the Centre Pompidou (2008) and the International Center of Photography in New York (2010). Not every specialist regards him as a discovery: some see in his success skilful curatorial work.

Miroslav Tichý died on 12 April 2011 in Veselí nad Moravou, in a hospital for long-term patients. As early as 2008 he had named as his heir and the holder of his copyright his neighbour Jana Hebnarová, who had looked after him for many years. The exhibition “The Artist with the Bad Camera” was held in Moscow in 2012.