photographer
text by BILL POWERS
All photos courtesy of Half Gallery and Foundation Tichý Ocean
As much as Richard Prince invented rephotography, artist Miroslav Tichý reinvented the camera itself, making his own cameras out of toilet paper rolls, thread spools, and other supplies he could access with limited means. Although he studied art in the late 1940s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, once the Soviets took over he was no longer able to make the kind of art he wanted and so returned to his hometown of Kyjov, where he lived with his parents for most of his life. His photographs of women — often in swimsuits, mostly taken surreptitiously — reveal an insatiable longing that somehow feels deeply intimate, even if captured at a safe distance. Tichý embellished these pictures with soft pencil lines and thumbprints and on occasion framed them with paper or cardboard backing. The variety of female forms he found necessary to document cut a huge swath: the fat, the skinny, the butch, the adolescent, and the borderline geriatric. In the immortal words of Humphrey Bogart, speaking to Claude Rains in Casablanca, “When it comes to women, you’re a true democrat.” Indeed, so was Miroslav Tichý. The photographs and drawings you see here have never been published before.
[Table of contents]
When Everyday Life Becomes Forms: Surinami, South America
by Viviane Sassen
night pictures
by Olivier Zahm and Stéphane Feugère with a portfolio on Area nightclub by Glenn O'Brien
by Hans Ulrich Obrist
by Miltos Manetas
by Xerxes Cook
by Olivier Zahm and Lily McMenamy
by Jeff Rian
by Olivier Zham
by Olivier Zahm
by Sven Schumann
by Francesco Bonami and Olivier Zahm
by Benjamin Alexander Huseby
by Katerina Jebb
by Camille Bidault Waddington
by Theo Wenner
by Roe Etheridge
by Chikashi Suzuki
by Mark Borthwick
by Carter Smith
by Karim Sadli
by Michael Hauptman
by Glenn O'Brien
by Katerina Jebb
by Dustin Dollin
by Gianni Oprandi
by Arto Saari