Miroslav Tichy - L'homme A La Mauvaise Camera

This is a monograph on the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy's photographs of women. He made them in secret with cameras he built by hand, and printed them as blurred, underexposed images that ignore the usual rules of the medium.

The 63-page hardcover, with text in French, gathers Tichy's photographs with essays on his life and work and closes with song lyrics the musician Nick Cave wrote for the artist. Tichy studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague, then withdrew to live in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, in Moravia. There he made the pictures collected here: informal, often blurred views of women photographed in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist regime. He printed them without regard for sharpness or correct exposure.

The essays in this edition, including one by the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, treat Tichy's practice as a private and obsessive one rather than as photography in a documentary or fine-art sense. They describe a large body of work made under conditions of near-total isolation.