Bill Randall

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Crashing a pro photographers’ conference, looking at cameras and lenses costing more than an acre of land in some places, was a little like being in the locker room in middle school.

It didn’t help that I was carting around a Holga, a plastic toy that shoots on 120mm film. Its focus dial offers: head, person, people, and mountain range. Its case occasionally keeps out the light, and the people who develop your film usually apologize until you mention, to their relief, a Holga was involved.

All the gear lust & envy brought to mind a few artists working with meager means. I have in mind not Bolexes and Holgas so much as the PXL-2000. This plastic video camera, with an ethereal black and white image taped to cassette, came from Fischer-Price. Grown up not at all, it now has it s own film festival, of all things.

And the whole of the work from the PXL hardly compares with the work, almost undiscovered, of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy. Working in virtual isolation, he returned to his hometown in Moravia after studying art in Prague. He made his own cameras, crafting long lenses out of pipes, tape, and handmade lenses. The photos– almost always of women, spied from afar– have a glowing, hazy texture, being born with the patina that takes most photos years to acquire. His approach would take most pros years to learn, as they unlearn all the artistic traps of expensive gear.

Miroslav Tichý, MT Inv. no.: 1-30, © Foundation Tichý oceán

Re-reading David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (released in English as Epileptic), three images struck me.  The book concerns his family, burdened by his older brother’s crippling seizures; looking for a cure, his parents turned to macrobiotics and metaphysics.  David B. draws liberally on fantasy throughout, mixing childhood perceptions with spiritual maps and strange history.

1. He also includes his childhood art,  not that far removed from his adult work.  All children draw, usually until some too-harsh criticism makes them stop; at a young adolescent stage, they often focus on the detail at the expense of the whole.

This focus also characterizes the art of the mentally ill, repeating intricate patterns like fractals.

2. As the book progresses, the images increasingly give way to diagrams, which mix and flow into the normal world of David B.’s family.  These images, drawn largely from medieval symbology and occultism by modern esoteric sects, show the world as a map, populated by strange creatures.  So do the meridian systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as Jean-Christophe is early treated by an acupuncturist.  They echo the scientific progress of mapping the body, always with an eye to control; they never do.

3. Likewise, the adult David B., cocooning himself in lines and meridians, only with his own pattern.