The Private Obsession of Miroslav Tichy

(Above) Tichy was known to sit for hours in wait of his unknowing subjects. The photo is in a handmade paper frame.
(Above) Two girls caught in conversation.
(Above) Two “secret” photos by Tichy, who often ran afoul of the law for taking photographs of women on the street.
(Above) A rare photograph, where the subject has actually posed for her photograph (or, at least it seems).
(Above) Processing the photos was also done by extremely primitive means—the result often having bad spots in the development.
(Above) An unknowing female subject gives subject matter for a beautiful picture.
(Above) Tichy, with his hand sewn clothes and his camera... which was made with sewing spools, a lens from found eyeglasses, rubber bands, toilet paper tubes and found cardboard/glue. The result: the oddest working camera you will ever see— something you might see in the movie Mad Max, or WaterWorld—where technology is lost and has to be re-invented.
(Above) A spooky photo of another female. This image is so odd it looks almost like a pre-natal sonogram.



An Accidental Mysteries “Blast from the Past” from January 17, 2009.

MIROSLAV TICHY HAS BECOME FAMOUS in spite of his need for privacy. Born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic, Tichy studied painting at the Academy of Art in Prague until the Communist takeover in April 1945. Arrested for being “odd,” therefor subversive, Tichy spent many years in jails and prisons, until he was released in the 1970s. Upon his release, he wandered his small town in rags, pursuing his occupation as an artist photographing the female form in the streets. He made his cameras from tin cans, childrens spectacle lens and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negative he selected. He stole intimate glimpses of his subjects through windows and the fences of swimming pools as well as in the streets, sometimes finding himself in trouble with the police.

The work, which might appear to the casual viewer to be intrusive voyeurism, takes on a melancholy and poetic quality. They are exquisitely produced small objects of obsession, which have no equal. He produced work, not for others, but for himself, with no regard for selling or exhibiting his pictures. Tichey’s photographs were known only to a few until July 2004, when he won the “New Discovery Award” at Arles. An exhibition of his work was also shown at Kunsthaus in Zurich in September 2005, and was one of the most curious and controversial photographic events of 2005.

Tichy’s work is now red hot. I first saw his work at the Outsider Art Fair in 2007, when it was exhibited by Galerie Susanne Zander, from Antwerp. His work is also exhibited by the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London.

One of the best Web sites on Tichy is the Foundation set up on his behalf: Tichy Ocean.

Some of the above text about Tichy is from the Michael Hoppen Gallery. Top two photos, from Galerie Susanne Zander.

Photographer E.O. Hoppé

(Above) In the West Street District, New York City, 1921. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [15423-0015]
Click any image for larger view.

(Above) View from the Delaware Bridge, 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17369-D]

(Above) Ford Factory, Detroit, Michigan 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17391-E]

(Above) Snow at Boston Railway Station, Massachusetts 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17378-0034]
Click any image for larger view.

(Above) New York City Rooftops from the Shelton Hotel, 1925. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [15423-0226]

(Above) Locomotive, Boston Railway Station, Massachusetts 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17378-0041]

(Above) Rooftops, Apartments, New York City (View from E.O. Hoppé’s studio on West 57th Street) 1921. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [15423-D]


I JUST DISCOVERED THE INCREDIBLE PHOTOGRAPH’S OF E.O. HOPPÉ, a modernist photographer whose work was not seen for 60 years, and only discovered several years ago through the investigative efforts of Graham Howe, a curator of photography in the United States.
I found his work on the incredibly important and rich photography Web site, Luminous Lint. Hoppé’s photographs were first seen at London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery in 2006.

Why is his work important? Why should his work be considered on equal of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and other pioneers of modernism? Just look at his work and the dates that he was making these prints. I would say, that had Hoppé’s photographic portfolio been known to photography curators even 30 years ago—his work would be in the mainstream photographic history books today. Photographic history books dealing with modernistic photography will, from now on, have to include E.O. Hoppé.

All images here follow the same copyright © as stated in Luminous Lint.

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Emil Otto Hoppé was born in Munich in 1878 but lived in England from 1900 until his death in 1972. As an early and important photo-modernist, his seminal views of the United States in the 1920s rivaled those of his American peers Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans. Hoppé shows us an America as only an outsider could: brave, new, and grand in scale but with a hint of trouble brewing in the gaps between its multicultural and economic diversities. Hoppé’s skill, intelligence, and photo-modernist vision established him in the 1920s and 30s as a dominate force in photographic art.

The photographer’s reputation was inadvertently eclipsed in 1954 when he sold his work to a London picture library where it was filed by subject and locked away—obscuring it from the public and from photographic historians. Only in 1994, through the research and investigative efforts of Graham Howe, photography curator and director of the traveling exhibitions and art services company Curatorial Assistance in Pasadena, California, has this major photographic collection been reassembled—enabling us to see for the first time in over half a century the work that evidenced Hoppé’s stellar achievement in the photo-modernist era.

Background
In 1907, after winning first prize in a contest sponsored by the London newspaper, the Daily Mail, Hoppé left banking to open a portrait studio in London’s Baron’s Court. His photographs of arts celebrities such as Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, A.A. Milne, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes quickly earned him the reputation as the top celebrity photographer in London. In 1913 he expanded his studio to the Kensington house of the late painter Sir John Millais, occupying all thirty-three rooms with his burgeoning operation. For over a decade Hoppé was London’s leading portrait photographer, and in 1919 he began take his camera to all continents of the world—photographing the people and landscapes in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Africa, the United States, Jamaica and the West Indies, Cuba, New Zealand, Australia, India and Ceylon, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaya, and Japan. Hoppé’s large-format gravure-printed photographic books about “Fair Women” (1922), Great Britain (1926), United States (1927), Germany (1930 and 1932), and Australia (1931) were likely to have influenced other important photographers who followed, including Bill Brandt, Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, and others.

Exhibitions and Publications
In October 2006 an enthusiastic press greeted the first exhibition of Hoppé’s work in over 60 years for Hoppé’s London at London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery. In April 2007 the exhibition E.O. Hoppé’s Amerika opened at Bruce Silverstein Photography accompanied by the publication of a 160-page monograph of the same title by W.W. Norton with an essay by Phillip Prodger.

This was the first U.S. showing of Hoppé’s American photographs in over 80 years.