Miroslaz Tichy

Another artist I came across was a fascinating character named Miroslav Tichy. Tichy lived in Prague most of his life which was under communist and soviet rule at the time. Between 1960 and 1985 Tichy, dressed in rags and living a poor vagrant life, took thousands of photos mostly of women using homemade pinhole cameras that most people thought were fake cameras of a mad and eccentric homeless man, often posing for him never realizing that these cameras were taking real photos.Tichy was just that, an eccentric, and he was held prisoner for almost a decade in soviet labor camps for basically being an eccentric homeless artist. He was seen by the soviets as being a dissident and unhelpful to the communist cause. Upon his release in the early 70's he continued using his homemade cameras to capture fleeting glimpses of people he would never know or could get close to. His images are fascinating to me, badly spotted and printed, often obscured by a wire fence that add to the artistic and poetic imperfections that Tichy's self imposed isolation must have felt at the time.