As an opponent of the communist regime, Miroslav Tichý did not have the easiest of prerequisites for a life as an artist. The Czech (1926-2011) spent several years in psychiatric institutions and also time in prison - he became a social outcast. Tichý renounced all possessions and thus also built his own cameras. Lenses made of toilet paper rolls, housings made of cardboard and lenses made of old eyeglass lenses or ground Plexiglas - all held together by chewing gum, with a shutter release made of rubber band. With these cameras he roamed around with the maxim to take a certain number of photos every day. For years these were 3 films of 36 pictures each.

His favorite subject in photography as well as drawing, clearly: the woman.

With a voyeuristic yet reserved and cautious look, he almost manically photographed women in the swimming pool, shopping in the store and at the market or with their children.

Formally characteristic for the prints - and due to the technically simplest methods - are bromine stains, fingerprints, other impurities and the very often blurred contours of the photographed women. Tichý often pasted the self-developed photographs onto found paper or cardboard and drew various frames around the images with pens or directly emphasized individual spots on the photograph. In his drawings, too, he worked on the same subject over and over again. Often with black ink and without setting off in a sweep.

From 2004 on, the work became internationally known through an exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann, and further solo exhibitions in Zurich, New York or Paris followed. Tichý himself seemed completely unimpressed by his late commercial success as an artist until his death in 2011.