Miroslav TichySCREENSHOTS

Photographing daily, Miroslav Tichý consistently pursued his practice from the academy: an exercise in looking, tracing and reproducing the female body.

His analog photography shows traces and errors he deliberately sought out by making his own cameras and enlargers. His images capture women in grainy patches of light and shadow. Printed on roughly cut, light-sensitive paper, they were often stuck to old scraps of paper gestures that invite being read as integral to the work.

In the 1970s and '80s, Miroslav Tichý took pictures of his television screen. Since he lived in the small town of Kyiov near the Austrian border, he was able to escape the confines and prudery of Eastern Bloc censorship and watch the Austrian television channel ORF with its western movies and more permissive late shows.

The glimpses of televised queens caught in the light appear ghastly and glorious. The moving images seem even more real than the still ones that preceded the television era. Lines in the images show the screen, sometimes reflecting a lightbulb in the room. This series marks a moment in time in a number of ways. One imagines Tichy glued to the screen catching changing images, as if he were taking a walk outside, but this time in an elusive world that emphasizes a new type of otherness.

Tichy's practice makes us revisit the way we relate to media and to the images that enter our personal lives and pierce the layers of showing and looking closely. His work is an excursion into the future of pictures spreading from reality into the virtual world of computer screens and mobile phones.

- CÉLINE MATHIEU

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Miroslav Tichý – Screenshots at the Galleria Edizioni Periferia in summer 2023. 

Softcover under dust jacket, 33 x 24 cm, b&w photographs. Text in German, English and Czech. Design: Stephan Fiedler, Berlin. Copy is open but in very good condition. More copies available end of January.