Szeemann in Seville in 2004, to the formation of the Tichý Ocean Foundation, and, now, to the Paris show.
It is in the nature of fairy tales of this sort that there is a potential for murkiness or unease. Here is a paranoid old man with a history of mental illness, unmarried, childless, so habituated to austerity that he has no need of money, whose work and legacy have been surrendered to those who find themselves in control of an extremely valuable body of work. The situation is inevitably complicated because the work has only assumed this visibility and value thanks to the efforts of the very custodians who lay themselves open to charges of exploitation and self-advancement. (Round Midnight immediately provoked critical blowback from people claiming that Paudras was not quite the selfless devotee portrayed in the film.) The bottom line, in this instance, is that without Buxbaum and the Tichý Ocean Foundation I would never have heard of Tichý and you would not be reading about him.
Tichý’s late rehabilitation may be the most extreme in the history of photography but it is not entirely unprecedented. In 2006 Hoppen cleverly paired Tichý and Jacques Henri Lartigue, whose work overlapped in several striking ways. Born into a life of privilege in 1894 Lartigue began photographing when he was a boy. Aged thirteen he suddenly got ‘a new idea: that I should go to the park and photograph those women who have the most eccentric or beautiful hats’. A year later he declared that ‘everything about [women] fascinates me – their dresses, their scent, the way they walk’. The results of these enthusiastic expeditions were pasted into homemade albums by the adolescent boy who went on to develop ambitions to be a painter. This desire was unfulfilled, but Lartigue continued to take photographs for his own delight and distraction. It is not until 1963, when he is almost seventy, that Lartigue finds himself exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and retrospectively installed as one of the founding fathers of modern photography.
Then there is E.J. Bellocq, whose photographs – some of them badly damaged – of prostitutes in New Orleans from the 1910s were eventually brought back from a long-forgotten death by Lee Friedlander (who also played a key part in the posthumous revival of William Gedney, another self-sufficient recluse). The difference between Bellocq and Tichý is that the former, evidently, was on close and friendly terms with the women he photographed. Even when Tichý’s wonky telephoto enables him to snuggle up deceptively close, his pictures gaze longingly on a world from which he is excluded. Whether the women look at him, berate him or remain oblivious to his approaches, they are absolutely beyond reach. This is formally enhanced by the fence that so often comes between the photographer and the women in the frame. It’s just the fence at the local pool but it imparts to the pictures the intensity of a prisoner’s peering through the bars of a cell.
Since the show is in Paris a personal anecdote about the city might be relevant at this point. In the summer of 1991 I went to live in Paris for a while. It was blazing hot, I knew almost no one and was in a torment of loneliness and sexual frustration. My apartment was a pit so I spent the afternoons in the park, looking, hoping, torn between the desire to talk to one of the many women sunbathing and terrified that to do so was a form of harassment. Meanwhile, other men were doing exactly what I wanted to do, sitting down, chatting to women – and not always getting told to shove off. I remember being crushed by the way the simple mathematics of desire refused to come out right: there were so many women in the world, how could it be so difficult to find one? The question contains its answer: it’s that tormenting and beckoning one, the chance in a million which non-mathematicians call love.
Tichý’s pictures are like photographs of that summer of longing extended over the course of a lifetime until it assumes a quality of stoic resignation or exile. Some are as erotically and romantically charged as any ever made. If anything that charge is felt even more strongly now, in the era of Internet porn, because, in spite of their abrupt cropping and haphazard framing, they contain the plausible context of desire and its frustrations and restraints of which the porno world is temptingly and deceptively devoid.
Not that all of Tichý’s pictures are of women. He sometimes photographed random objects, stuff he came across on a washing line, for instance. It just happens that the washing line is laden with bras hung out to dry. When Tichý was not on the prowl or lurking round the pool he would photograph women at home, screen-grabbing them from the telly. ‘People say I think too much about women,’ another artist once remarked. ‘Yet after all, what is there more important to think about?’ That was Rodin. At times, though, Tichý’s one-track mind suggests a kinship with figures lower down the cultural totem pole: Benny Hill, for example. When Tichý comes across a team of women stretching and exercising in a park the resulting image cackles with barely suppressed glee. But the distinction between high and low is not easy to sustain for there is, of course, a Benny Hillish quality about passages in the novels of Tichý’s celebrated fellow Czech – and near-contemporary – Milan Kundera. In both, the abundantly erotic – participatory in the novels, entirely voyeuristic in the photographs – is a tacit escape from the deadweight of historical materialism.
Different men tend to be attracted to different physical types of women: thin or voluptuous, blonde or brunette. For Tichý anything in a dress was great – though without a dress was even better. He sees a hefty, middle-aged-looking woman in an unflattering calf-length skirt bending over to talk to someone in a car – yep, that’ll do. He would have endorsed, wholeheartedly, the title of Garry Winogrand’s 1975 book of street shots, Women Are Beautiful. Some of the critical flak aimed at Winogrand might have been dodged if lines written ten years later had been available as a contextualising epigraph. ‘Women are beautiful when young, almost all women,’ says the elderly female narrator of John Berger’s Once in Europa. ‘Whatever the proportion of a face, whether a body is too skinny or too heavy, at some moment a woman possesses the power of beauty which is given to us as women. Often the moment is brief. Sometimes the moment may come and we may not even know it. Yet traces of it remain.’ This is Tichý’s equivalent of the decisive moment – a moment which, for all the reasons outlined above, cannot be reliably captured. It’s hit and miss. ‘When I do something, it has to be precise,’ Tichý has said. ‘True, the lens was not precise, but maybe that’s where the art is.’
That Tichý’s art is inseparable from the technical limitations and imperfect state of his pictures is manifest at many levels. At least until the eponymous film came and slightly spoiled things, Bob Dylan’s song ‘I’m Not There’ was the most cherished of all the bootleg recordings – in spite of and because of the lyric being incomplete and, in places, inaudible. The effect is movingly evoked by composer Michael Pisaro: ‘It’s almost as though he has discovered a language or, better, has heard of a language: heard about some of its vocabulary, its grammar and its sounds, and before he can comprehend it, starts using this set of unformed tools to narrate the most important event of his life.’ Or, to translate this back into visual terms, to capture the most important moments in his life on film – but since these moments lack clarity and definition they could, as easily, be any man’s or everyman’s.
The value of ‘I’m Not There’ is also a function of its rarity: the song is almost not there, exists only in this incomplete take. The production of images gathered pace throughout the twentieth century and then, with the spread of digital, the idea of scarcity or any economy of production simply disappeared. Tichý’s pictures – he seems not to have made multiple prints – have the quality of relics that have survived some kind of visual holocaust, when only these decrepit traces (that Berger word again) remain. They share with the earliest pictures by William Henry Fox Talbot the sense of wonder that a thing such as photography has actually come to pass. Hence the peculiar temporal compression of Tichý’s work. It is as if one of the pioneers of photography, instead of taking slow pictures of flowers or statues, was somehow able to snap chicks in bikinis! So they are like premonitions and memories. ‘Memory has a spottiness,’ writes John Updike, ‘as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.’ The chemical stains, bleaches and other defects make Tichý’s pictures seem like highly personal memories of universal longings – but memories in the process of fading so that they are indistinguishable
