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MIROSLAV TICHÝ
untitled, 1950s - 80s
gelatin silver print, unique
image: 27.3 cm x 11.4 cm
image framed: 30.5 cm x 14.3 cm
ESTIMATE: $6,000-8,000
The primary photographic subject of Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy has been women in the streets of his small hometown in Moravia. Born in 1926, Tichy studied at the Academy of Art in Prague in the 1940s, and from the 1950s through the mid 1980s, he shot hundreds of images daily. Often shot through windows and fences, he produced intimate glimpses of young and old women, usually caught unaware with a camera hidden in his pocket. His hand-made cameras are imaginatively cobbled together from old tins, toilet rolls children’s spectacles and cigarette boxes with lenses cut from Plexiglas and polished with a mixture of toothpaste and ashes. The imperfections from this equipment together with his equally primitive printing equipment produce blurry images of scratchy clotted surfaces. Light bleed adds to their sense of luminosity. These effects reflect what he calls the poetics of bromide. His compellingly voyeuristic images express the transience of physical beauty and the passage of time.
A recluse, Tichy’s photographs were known only to a few until 2004 when he won the “New Discovery Award” in Arles. Subsequently he has had major exhibitions and publications produced at The Kunsthaus Zurich and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Each Tichy print is unique as he made only one print from each negative. His indescribable works are exquisitely produced objects of obsession. No longer making photographs, his work is much sought after. As with the photograph here, he often adorns the print with a paper passe-partout embellished with drawing.
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