is by no means the first to make good this lack. But his method is one that shares an unlikely affinity with the kind of experience recorded in the journals of those early explorers. The lack of conventional ‘sights’ or landmarks meant that these journals lacked obvious narrative direction. So, asks the writer Paul Carter in his book Living in a New Country, ‘What is it that gives the discontinuous aggregation of details its narrative direction?’ The answer – but note, first, the concise characterisation of the typical photographic journey à la Frank contained by that question – is that the true subject of these explorer writings is ‘historical space – spatiality as historical experience’. Or, to put it in terms borrowed from the fictional explorer, Voss, infinity as glimpsed at a particular moment in time or history.
At this point it is worth re-emphasising that Parke is a member of Magnum. In some ways the opportunities for photojournalism no longer exist in the way that they did for Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith or Larry Burrows in the various heydays of Life and Time magazines. While it is tempting to lament the decline of photojournalism of the sort traditionally associated with Magnum the recruitment of people like Parke, Martin Parr and Alec Soth has been crucial in preventing it from becoming a kind of heritage agency whose members can be relied on to stamp stories with the photographic equivalent of a heraldic seal. Perhaps the most noticeable recent development in photojournalism – a development coupled with the decline of Life-like magazines and the subsequent increase in opportunities for the presentation and sale of photography as art – is for more intensely and varied subjective responses to events and places. Needless to say, this complicates but does not undermine the documentary imperative to bear witness, to report back on what one saw at a particular time, in a certain place.
The reportage in Minutes to Midnight is of a highly personal and elemental kind: events, people and places as they are chanced upon and as they appear, not in the face of a looming deadline, but in the perma-glare of the outback. Take the well-known picture of Aboriginals hanging out in the street outside the Club Hotel, Wiluna. The hotel sign reads ‘Welcome to Paradise’. Plenty of photographers have exploited the ironic gap between the boasts made by billboards or signs and the way that the surrounding reality falls short of those claims. In this sad place irony seems an alien luxury, an exotic import, and the gap is as vast and arid as a desert. And it’s not just irony that is lacking. The moment caught in this shot of paradise and the wreckage strewn around it is devoid, also, of the kind of split-second urgency that characterises Capa’s famous D-Day photographs. What we get, in this shattered paradise, is the depiction of a state in which what might be expected to be a matter of urgent attention has become a permanent condition of existence, one marked by the complete erosion of any notion of urgency. Like many of Parke’s photographs it is beyond news. It looks as if it could have been taken the day after tomorrow, in the aftermath of history.
2008
Van Gogh’s rise to posthumous glory is unsurpassable but, in scale and strangeness, the story of Miroslav Tichý’s triumph will take some beating. And, unlike Van Gogh, he is around to enjoy it – sort of. Tichý is eighty-two now, and if he could be persuaded to leave his lair in Kyjov, in the Czech Republic, he would see his name writ large on the banners fluttering outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where a retrospective of his work has just opened.
The first things on display are Tichý’s cameras and lenses, looking as rusty and old as weapons unearthed from the battlefields of the First World War. Photographers tend to be obsessed by kit, are always trying out new lenses, films and processes. Tichý began photographing with the most basic Russian-made camera – and this was the technological highpoint of his career. Thereafter he became a scavenger, modifying and building his equipment with whatever came to hand: a rewind mechanism made of elastic from a pair of shorts and attached to empty spools of thread; lenses from old spectacles and Plexiglas, polished with sandpaper, toothpaste and cigarette ash. His telephotos were cobbled together from plastic drain pipes and empty food tins. He also made his own enlarger, out of cardboard and planks. Tichý’s make-do-and-mend philosophy apparently extends to his own, um, wardrobe. Photographs from the early 1990s show him holding his DIY camera, wearing a filthy sweater, stitched together with what look like dead beetles. These portraits of the artist as an old castaway remind one of John McCarthy’s reaction on first seeing long-term hostage Brian Keenan: ‘Fuck me, it’s Ben Gunn!’
So what did Tichý do, once he was kitted out with his homemade arsenal? Put as simply as possible, he spent the 1960s and ’70s perving around Kyjov, photographing women. Ideally he’d catch them topless or in bikinis at the local swimming pool; failing that, he’d settle for a glimpse of a knee or – the limitations of the camera meant the framing was often askew – an ankle. That is the least of the pictures’ defects: most are under-or over-exposed as well. Michael Hoppen is currently exhibiting a small selection of Tichýs at his London gallery. I asked him how many really good Tichý pictures there were in total. ‘In focus?’ he replied, as if that were a personal preference, and not a prerequisite for photographic adequacy. ‘Maybe two or three hundred.’ In some of these the ostensible subject is all but blanched out of existence by a blaze of intruding light.
We have concentrated, so far, on the most orthodox phase of Tichý’s working methods. Once developed and printed the pictures were subjected to a protracted form of editorial hazing: left out in the rain, used as beer mats or to prop up wobbly tables. Where the definition was not sharp enough Tichý would pencil around breasts or hips like an enthusiastic but unqualified cosmetic surgeon. Sometimes he’d frame the pictures with a specially chosen mount: a garbage sack, say, or a bit of squiggled-on card. One of the works at the Pompidou has been gnawed by the rats with whom the artist shares his home. It may be hard to resist the conclusion that Tichý is a few frames short of a roll – but he’s shrewd with it: ‘If you want to be famous,’ he has said, ‘you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world.’
And the eccentricities of Tichý’s habits should not blind us to the conventional aspects of his early formation. Enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1945, he eagerly embraced the liberationist promise of modernism. This promise was broken when the Communists came to power in 1948, dragging in their wake the social-realist imperatives of heroic representation of proletarian endeavour. After a brief period of military service Tichý responded by retreating to his home town of Kyjov. In 1957, during the cultural thaw ushered in by Stalin’s death, Tichý was slated to participate in a group exhibition from which he suddenly withdrew. Gripped by the delusion that his colleagues were part of a fascist conspiracy, he suffered a complete breakdown that led to his being committed to a psychiatric clinic for a year.
From that time on his life assumes the curious combination of neglect and compulsion that will eventually be transformed into the stuff of cultural legend (Nick Cave has written a song about him; Michael Nyman is contemplating an opera based on his life). He abandons everything else and, throughout the fluctuating political climate of the 1960s and ’70s – and despite repeated victimisation by the authorities and further incarceration in psychiatric hospitals – burrows away at his new existence as ‘a stone-age photographer’.
As often happens, the fairy-tale outcome of his story is largely down to the efforts of a confidant uniquely convinced of the worth of a man assumed to be an unstable outcast or renegade loser. (The film Round Midnight, based on the relationship between the alcoholic, tubercular and periodically mad pianist Bud Powell and Francis Paudras, the young Frenchman who saves him from ruin, is archetypal in this respect). In Tichý’s case it was the boy next door, Roman Buxbaum, who began collecting and conserving the work that Tichý treated with consummate disdain. (There is a wonderful sequence in Buxbaum’s documentary, Retired Tarzan, where Tichý flicks through samples of his work before
