Miroslav Tichy

After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, and working--at some risk--as an abstract painter in Communist Czechoslovakia, Miroslav Tichy turned to a life in isolation in his home town of Kyjov, Moravia. In his fourth decade, in the 1960s, he began to take photographs of local women at the town pool using cameras he made by hand out of scrap and peering through the fence, which imposed its lines on every image. His is one of those incredible stories: Tischy is a driven, fiercely private artist with a large body of work that the world might easily never have seen. But in this case the story ends with the receipt of the Arles Recontres de la Photographie Discovery Award in 2005. Or rather it keeps going, with this collection, among the strangest, most touching contributions ever made to Western art's gallery of bathers.