Miroslav Tichy

Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls said, "There's a fine line between clever and stupid." In Miroslav Tichy's case that line would be, "There a fine line between art and stalking." Tichy, who was born in 1926, makes homemade cameras and hides in the bushes to take photos of unsuspecting women.

According to Radek Horacek, the director of The Brno House of Art where Tichy's photos have been exhibited:

"They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realize that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichy managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichy but his photographs are different. A woman's tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious."

As someone who takes photos from a car of people doing trivial activities I have little room to judge. However, my images lack a sexual component which fill Tichy's.

Roman Buxbaum, a childhood friend of Tichy's said:

"These days there are plenty of artists that take photographs. They have the most modern digital equipment and the best computer software. They all try to make their pictures look crude. They want something like a document of a reality. But can you believe a thirty-year-old university graduate? Does he really know what is crude? It is simply impossible, especially in comparison to Miroslav Tichy. He lurks in a horrible worn out coat and - from behind bushes and walls - takes photographs of fragments of female nudity or the steps of a woman walking down a street."

Ahem. Yes, crude. In my defense my primary reason for not using a crude camera to take photos is that processing film is expensive. Holgas, for example, are cheap but processing a single roll of film costs nearly as much as the camera.