Genius Photographer And Creeper
Here’s a fascinating article on an eccentric Czech creeper and voyeur who took beautiful candid photos with deliberately-bad home-made cameras:
Charming eccentric or tolerated local boogyman? The townspeople of Kyjov in Czech Republic could never quite decide. Miroslav Tichý took nearly a hundred photographs a day with his homemade camera, wandering around the streets of his hometown, often spotted at bus stops, the main square, the park and the swimming pool, although he was frequently arrested for lingering around the local pool taking pictures of unsuspecting women.
The arrests prompted him to start fashioning makeshift telephoto lenses:
When he was banned from the local pool, he made telephoto lenses with cardboard tubes to snap his clandestine photographs from a distance, which is why a wire fence can sometimes be seen in his pictures… He ground lenses out of plastic with toothpaste and ash, putting them together with cardboard toilet paper tubes, dressmaker’s elastic and old camera parts he found.
I will confess, I am at something of a loss in knowing what to think about these photos. They are unquestionably gorgeous works of art. And yet the process of their production has a substantial creep factor. Should that matter? Is it possible to simultaneously condemn the artistic method and celebrate the resulting art?
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Was he a voyeur? Well, yes, in the sense that it has been said that we ALL are voyeurs… at least, the healthy among us are.
Was he the boogyman? I doubt it. I see no real evidence of any pathology. Just because his photos show no women inviting us to examine them gynecologically, like many modern “porn” pics, doesn’t mean that he deserves the “creep” label.
Was he eccentric? Yes, by popular opinion, perhaps so.
You can’t tell a woman that you want to capture her natural beauty candidly, and then expect to obtain a genuine candid image. It’s contradictory. And, a POSED photo doesn’t have the same beauty and charm as an unposed photo. Not that a posed pic can’t be beautiful, but it’s just different!
Even the fact that some women noticed him with his comical camera’s, and playfully struck mock poses, provides us with a product that is fundamentally different from a product of a believed professional photographer or a recognized “pornographer” and his professional model.
It was not naive of him, but rather sophisticated to make the statement, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”…
And, I might add, there is no law that I’M aware of that says that the artist must produce his work for popular consumption… or even appreciation.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, but more important than that, he had the heart and soul of an artist and a revolutionary. His government wanted him to produce propaganda, his work opposed them eloquently.
As John Cougar Mellencamp once sung:
“I fight authority, authority always wins
I been doing it since I was a young kid and I come out grinning”.
As far as I’m concerned, he gave his life fighting a totalitarian regime, and who can say just how important his influence was, given the “butterfly effect”…
Was he obsessed with women? Who knows? Who am I to judge? …and why would I want to? Maybe. Thankfully… To OUR good fortune. And what red-blooded male isn’t?
Personally, I don’t even condemn his method. He’d fit right in with the students and professors at my old art school. I’d say label him genius, or at least, close to it…
Yes, it’s certainly possible for the artist to use immoral methods to create works of art. ( One could argue, though, that if the subjects are in a public place, they don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy. ) And for the rest of us to then enjoy the work of art for its own sake.
Falbert, sure, we can easily make a reductio ad absurdam example about sculptures made from the bones of murder victims or something. And narrow legalistic arguments about any specific set of photos can always be crafted. But “no expectation of privacy” won’t satisfy the person who empathizes with the model and considers that her wishes should be respected, reasonable expectations or otherwise.
Whiplash challenges my “creeper” label but I chose it very carefully. “Creeper” is a contemporary social judgement that connotes behavior that’s not obviously illegal but which attracts some degree of social condemnation or unease — which, judging from his pool-banning and other social reactions described in the article, seems to describe this guy fairly well.
I honestly don’t know what to think about art like this. On the one hand, we certainly don’t want to reward creepy behavior in society, which means that celebrating art made in creepy ways has a certain social cost. (This is also why right-thinking people don’t circulate otherwise-hilarious videos of pranks performed on unsuspecting victims.) On the other hand, I tend to think art deserves to stand or fall on its own merits. If it’s good, it’s good. At the end of the day, I guess we just have to balance these issues in our minds on a case-by-case basis, make our decisions, and then bull through the inevitable criticism from folks who would have preferred the other choice.
I’m just amazed by his cameras. Sorry, I don’t have any contribution to the discussion about how ethical his behaviour was, I just can’t get past his cameras.