Redemption in Looking: A Brief Musing on Miroslav Tichý

Miroslav Tichý took thousands of surreptitious photos from handmade cameras fashioned out of cardboard and tin of unsuspecting women in his hometown of Kyjov, Czech Republic in the 1950s-1985. The organic nature of the cameras imperfectly developed the delapidated nature the works, whose ruptures and smudges Tichý likened to poetry. His subject’s reaction to a Bruce Gilden-adjacent photographic approach, if the subjects knew they were subjects at all, ranged from offense to amusement, yet nonetheless uninviting.

Without the consent of the subject, the viewer is coerced to look. Or, inserted into the position of an unwilling looker by peeping through the lens of an elderly Czech freak. We are all implicated by looking, subjugated even, the viewer as much of a victim as the subject, and we must redeem ourselves from this position by piecing together these fragmented women: brushes of high heels, glimpses of mesh tights, or the blurriness of a white inner thigh or breast. By looking more and further, the viewer puzzles together a language comprised of a muddled confrontation with lanky limbs and an opposite, shameful “hidden-ness” (behind fences, buildings, and crowds). Then, through coercion, implication, subjugation, and continued looking, a fragmented vision of Kyjoy’s women becomes more whole.