Untitled, ca. 1950s–80s, black-and-white photograph with graphite, mounted.

“If you want to be famous,” photographer Miroslav Tichý once said, “you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.” Born in 1926 in Czechoslovakia, Tichý spent decades taking voyeuristic photographs of women bathing. His subjects are caught unawares, often through fences or peepholes, in an erotically isolated moment. The pictures are spotted, blurred, crooked, scratched, and underexposed—done, by any conventional standards, “badly.” These flaws of execution are surpassed only by the crudeness of Tichý’s cameras, which were made with materials such as shoeboxes, tin cans, toilet-paper rolls, sandpaper, and toothpaste.

Tichý the man was equally disheveled. A ragged town eccentric, he had been trained as a classical painter but quit the academy after the Communist takeover forced artists to focus on socialist subjects. He remained, however, a diligent practitioner of the arts. He took three rolls of film a day, printed each negative only once, and embellished the prints with homemade frames. The results amount to a clever commentary on the state; his disguised cameras and the atmosphere of surveillance in his work subtly allude to the surveillance of the society at large. But the furtive pictures are also beautiful. They recall the scratched bodies of Degas’s bathers; they presage the soft focus of Richter. Their imperfection imprints them with the personal. As Tichý himself said, “A mistake. That’s what makes the poetry.” 

Untitled, c.1950s–80s, black-and-white photograph.

Untitled, c.1950s-80s, black-and-white photograph, mounted.

Untitled, c.1950s–80s, black-and-white photograph with graphite.

Untitled, c.1950s-80s, black-and-white photograph, mounted.

All Images are courtesy Horton Gallery and © Foundation Tichý Ocean and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

“Sun Screen,” an exhibition of Tichý’s work, is on view until September 10, 2011 at the Horton Gallery in New York City.