Victoria Olsen

Miroslav Tichy, "Untitled."More from ICP this week: going to see the Atgets (below) and the surrealist visions of Paris, which were the star attractions there, I stumbled on this work by Miroslav Tichy. The Czechoslovakian Tichy, who is mostly unknown here in the U.S., has been photographing his small village for decades and produces striking, seemingly "artless" images like the one here. Of course there is "art" all over it, as the proximity of the surrealist work makes especially clear. But Tichy is an original too. Using handmade cameras and documenting his own community, he finds his own inspirations, from girls in bathing suits to couples on park benches. His surreptitious style means we see many retreating figures, and few people meet our gaze or his. If he implicates us in his voyeurism he does so gently.

Tichy's world is small and self-contained. There are no broad vistas, no long shots. He uses found materials like cardboard and pieces of plastic, reinforcing the impression of eccentric "outsider" art. Many of his photographs are manipulated by hand: he draws on the prints or creates elaborate painted frames for them. This one is as haunting for the scratches and smears on the negative as for the ghostly figures.  Like this one, the works seem spontaneous, intimate, and natural.  But they also seem to refer to Man Ray's sun prints and Matisse's bathers.  Are these women floating in science-fictional space or figures dancing on an Etruscan vase?

"Hôtel de Marquis de Chantosme, 6 rue de Tournon," 1900 (Printed 1900-1927), International Center for Photography.You may recognize this elegant photograph as one of Eugene Atget's portraits of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Paris. Atget specialized in these still, pristine, balanced compositions of windows and doors, storefronts and cobblestones. Few people live in his Paris, though there is every sign of human civilization.  An exhibit at the International Center for Photography, entitled "Atget: Archivist of Paris" gets at this quality: his documentation of lonely urban landscapes at a particular turning point in history.  On display until May 9, it puts Atget's clear, dispassionate eye on view.

What I like about this image, taken in 1900, is its strange perspective, where the courtyard doesn't square up and the corners aren't quite symmetrical.  Atget positioned himself so far off center that the near wall seems squeezed unnaturally into the frame.  As a demonstration of three-dimensionality it may fail: the left side of the image is much flatter than the right side.  But it succeeds beautifully as a haunting shadow of a long-gone world, now preserved in shades of brown.