MIROSLAV TICHÝ & JULIA MARGARET CAMERON
26 JANUARY–23 MARCH 2008

Miroslav Tichý, born 1926 in today's Czech Republic where he still lives.

Julia Margaret Cameron, born 1815 in India, lived most of her life in England and died 1879 in Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka) where she was buried.

Two artists who have chosen photography as a means of expression, separated by an era. Their works are fundamentally different yet related, and are the result of vastly different circumstances. Tichý took startling images that make that which is depicted appear exciting in all its familiarity. Cameron has portrayed celebrities in relaxed moments and their families as idealised beauties.

Miroslav Tichý (b. 1926) was inspired mainly by the everyday moments of the 1960's up to the 90's in his Czech hometown Kyjov. The anonymous subjects in his pictures are mothers, pensioners, shop assistants, students, bathers of all ages, career women and housewives, in cafés, shops, streets and plazas, waiting for the bus, with their legs crossed on a park bench, in an intimate conversation. - anonymous portraits are a tribute to woman in many guises. The non-perfection of the photos, the haziness, the blotches and asymmetry evoke the early photographic experiments and explorations.

While studying painting at the Academy of Art in Prague in the late 1940's, Tichý was troubled by the totalitarianism of the era. He was constantly involved in conflicts with the communist regime that was for social realism instead of modernistic and expressionistic ideals within the arts. Step by step, he retreated from the art scene and society in general. He spent several years alternately in prison and in mental institutions, and over the years he became successively more radical in his antipathy, challenging norms and contradicting society's preconceptions of an orderly life, living in isolation as a result. But he never ceased to express himself artistically. He gave up painting and took up photography. With simple means but with great knowledge and enthusiasm he built cameras and objectives, using cardboard, toilet rolls, bottle tops, thread spools and other materials. The lenses were made of rough-cut Plexiglas that was honed with a mixture of toothpaste and ashes. Afterwards, he processed and 'improved' many of his photos by filling in the motifs with a pen where he felt his composition technique was flawed. A few simple lines bring out the contours of a dress, enhance an eye or put curls in hair. His past as a painter shines through in the elaborate mounts he made for his photographs. Nowadays Tichý still lives in Kyjov but he no longer photographs.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) made portraits of the British Victorian cultural elite and their families, and even her servants. The men were often shown in their professional capacity, as authors, scientists and artists. Rather than being portrayed in person, the women in Cameron's photos represent literary, mythological or religious characters. In these photos, Cameron portrayed the beauty ideals of the time, inspired by Pre-Raphaelite painting, with the models in languid poses, often gazing into the distance.

She was 48 when her daughter Julia Norman gave her a camera in 1863. Married to Charles Hey Cameron, a prominent solicitor and liberal reformer, she belonged to the British cultural elite and had the advantage of being able to devote her time to photography. At the family residence Dimbola in Freshwater (on the Isle of Wight) Cameron converted a poultry house into a studio and a coal shed into a darkroom. As a woman in the Victorian era, she found herself in a male-dominated world, with very little opportunity to be noticed. Her unconventional ways of working in the new medium soon won her great recognition, however. Cameron's reality consisted of manoeuvring large, awkward apparatus. Glass plates served as negatives, prepared individually for each exposure and developed immediately thereafter. Careful handling and treatment were crucial. A picture took hours to create. As far as we know, she applied only the wet collodion method, a technique both physically demanding and not entirely risk-free. The process, with its various chemicals, required that each step was carried out meticulously. The slightest mistake in the procedure was revealed in the finished photograph. Despite careful preparations Cameron experimented with her pictures in the developing process. She printed different sections from the same plate, scratching some negatives to remove details, add a halo or enhance the hair. But one can often find 'flaws' near the edges occasioned by carelessness or attempts at shortcuts. Instead of cropping away the unintentional flaws, Cameron appears to have preferred to leave these traces of the process. Like Tichý, she seems to have valued the aesthetic quality more highly than technical perfection.

Her photos have a surprising intimacy: close-up studies of proud professionals in obviously relaxed moments, serious, mysterious beauties with their wild hair in dramatic lighting or framed in lush verdure. Cameron worked with large formats and took extreme close-ups, often hiding the models' clothes and thus making it harder to date the photographs. With dramatic chiaroscuro effects and a slight haziness she tried to convey proximity and a dreamlike mood. Although she in some respects demonstrates a conventional eye in relation to her own era, Cameron's format, composition and lighting were those of an innovator in the infancy of photography. What was just a hobby to her has come to be an invaluable historic contribution since her portraits in some cases are the only existing pictures of some of these famous personages.

Cameron was eager to communicate her imagery to others and marketed her photographs at exhibitions and sometimes even charged for her portraits. Julia Margaret Cameron produced more than 1,200 glass negatives from which she developed more than 3,000 photos. She recorded all her material in detailed lists and in her unfinished memoirs, Annals of My Glass House (written in 1874 but published in 1889) - a catalogue not only for herself but probably with a view to future generations' interest in her works. Works by Cameron have in the last decades been exhibited at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (SE), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA), National Portrait Gallery, London (UK) and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (USA).

Photographs by Miroslav Tichý were for the first time shown in a group exhibition at Die Blaue Kunsthalle in Cologne (DE) in 1990 and in 2004 at the Seville Biennale. In 2005 Kunsthalle Zürich (CH) presented Tichý's first solo exhibition and since then his work has been shown in various countries such as Canada, USA, Germany, and most recently in China. The Centre Pompidou in Paris (FR) will also host a solo exhibition in May 2008.

Text: Excerpt from the text Long Moments by Tessa Praun, written for the richly illustrated book published by Magasin 3 to accompany the exhibition. The book will be available in February 2008.

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Julia Margaret Cameron
All works albumen prints and from Collection Moderna Museet.

"The Angel at the Tomb", 1870 (Mary Ann Hillier (later Mrs Gilbert), 1847-1936. Lady Polllock)

"The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty", 1866 (Mrs Keene)

"The Angel in the House", 1873 (Emily Peacock, Freshwater)

"Henry Taylor", 1867 (The author Sir Henry Taylor 1800-1886)

"The Passion Flower at the Gate", ca 1870 (Maud)

Miroslav Tichý
Black and white photographs, partly worked on and mounted. All works untitled and undated, between 1960-1990. All works © Foundation Tichý Oceán

MT inv. no 4-40, 4-97, 5-4-36 courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
MT inv. no 4-98, 5-6-76 courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
MT inv. no 5-6-119 courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

Saturday, January 26 at 3pm
Lecture by Roman Buxbaum, the founder of "Foundation Tichy Océan" and producer of the film about Miroslav Tichy that will be shown as part of the exhibition.

Sunday, February 2 at 2pm
Tessa Praun, curator for Tichy/Cameron gives a tour of the exhibition.

Thursday, February 14 at 7pm
Lecture by Leif Wigh (former curator at Moderna museet) entitled A look at the past. About older photographic technology and its users, 1839-1980.

In his lecture Leif Wigh will talk about the technological and stylistic developments of photographic history's different periods using examples from the exhibition. During the second half of the 19th century Julia Margaret Cameron developed a very personal artistic approach using the technology of her time. At first glance one could think that the Czech artist Miroslav Tichy was inspired by her approach. His self-constructed cameras are particulary exciting. There was also a trend among image-makers of the 1970's of using old-fashioned cameras in order to achieve certain effects and moods in their images.

"LONG MOMENTS"
Prologue by David Neuman, director of Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Text by Tessa Praun, curator

Exhibition catalog nr 37 produced in 2008 by Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.
Language: Swedish/English
64 pages, color. Richly illustrated. Hard cover.
Published 2008
ISBN 978-91-976646-1-5
Price: 200 SEK

(Extract from the text)

I have never done anything else than letting time pass by. I go to town and must do something than just doing nothing. So I was simply pressing the release. (Miroslav Tichý)

Movement, laughter, a wink, a word - click - a moment captured inside the camera and later released to spread out on the paper. The magic of photography that is created in the dark by letting in light for a certain time. Physical turned abstract turned physical again. The transformation from colour to black and white, from three-dimensional to two-dimensional. Movement is frozen, sound is silenced. Time has stopped in one eternally long moment. Time - a fundamental concept that is nevertheless hard to define. Time - a crucial element in photography. The poetry of photography comes from the artist's awareness of the interplay between light and time, and it invites the viewer on a voyage through a world characterised by the attempts to erase the boundaries between past, present, future.

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied. (Julia Margaret Cameron)

Two artists who have chosen photography as a means of expression, separated by an era. Their works are fundamentally different yet related, they seem contemporary yet timeless. They are united by a will and ability to capture the spirit of their time and immortalise it. The respective visual idioms of Miroslav Tichý and Julia Margaret Cameron are the result of vastly different circumstances. Tichý composed startling images that make the depiction appear exciting in all its familiarity. Cameron has portrayed celebrities in relaxed moments and their families have posed as idealised beauties. The activities of both strive to capture the commonplace and hold the extraordinary, in an attempt to make the ephemeral moment last a little longer or minutes to appear spontaneous.

Excerpt from the book Long Moments, 2008