Monograph on Miroslav Tichý's unconventional and artisanal (blurred, underexposed photos, taken with handmade cameras) but powerfully evocative work.
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichý (1926-2011, Czech Republic) withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia. In the late 1950s he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on handmade frames, added finishing touches in pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result is works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. They constitute a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of feminine beauty in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
