In Memory of Miroslav Tichý (1926–2011)

Miroslav Tichý, a major Czech photographer and one of the most mysterious and reclusive artists of the twentieth century, passed away on April 12, 2011, at age 84. Tichý was a genuine eccentric, known as much for his makeshift cardboard cameras as for his haunting and distorted images of women and landscapes, all taken near his home in Kyjov Moravia, Czech Republic. He began photographing in the 1950s, in part as a political response to the social repressions of Czech communism, but his intensely private work did not gain public attention until 2005, when the artist was nearly eighty. In 2010, the International Center of Photography published a monograph on Tichy and presented a retrospective his work from the 1960s and 70s, the first museum in North America to do so.

“In the context of Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia of the 1960s, Tichy's smudgy snapshotlike pictures of the women of his hometown of Kyjov are a record of not only private artistic obsessions but also of a defiant quest for personal pleasures amid public repression,” said ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, who organized the 2010 retrospective. “Though Tichy was quite elderly and had stopped taking photographs decades ago, his work remains fresh and vibrant, and his death yesterday is experienced as a profound loss.”