For the twenty-first century viewer, steeped in the ethics of representation and feminism, the first couple of rooms of the exhibition of recently discovered photographs by Czech photographer, Miroslav Tichy are unsettling. He explores the possibilities of "painting with a camera" all the time focussing on the female form. Over and over and over again, he obsessively photographs women at swimming pools, in the streets, in motion, stationary, supine, standing up, clothed, unclothed, in closeup and long shot. The obsession with which he photographs women's bodies, always from a distance, rarely with their consent, comes close to the perverse visions of a stalker. However, as we move through the exhibition, and familiarize ourselves with his photographs rescued from the dustbins of history, they take on a rare beauty.

The photographs were produced with Tichy's home-crafted cameras and makeshift processing techniques in the austerity of the censorship-ridden 1960s and 1970s Czechoslovaia. Harking back to early photographic experiments in photography of modernist photographs such as Edward Steichen - who also used the camera to capture the painterliness of the world - these deliberately distressed images also have a reverie to them that has disappeared from contemporary photography. They are anachronistic, not only for 2008 visitors to the Centre Pompidou, but also for their moment of production in the 1960s and 1970s.

The pamphlet accompanying the exhibition classifies the photographs as amateur. However, this category is more of a critical convenience than an accurate description of the blurred and blemished female bodies. Yes, like amateur images, they are exploring elements of the photographic medium: they display an extraordinary sense of composition, a sensitivity to the relationship between image and object, viewer and viewed, as well as the relations between light and dark and all the options in between. But, the obsessive focus on the female form speaks more articulately to the concerns of a professional photographer who, like photographers at the turn of the century, were interested in painting with the camera. The endless studies in light and darkness, movement and stasis, form and figure are as close as the camera will perhaps ever come to sketches of a studio model, particularly, those images in the second of the  six exhibition rooms; "figure/studies." Tichy's photographs are about form and the translation of that form into a two dimensional representation - a preoccupation once belonging to painting, and taken up by photography around the turn of the last century. Such concerns are not, traditionally speaking, the territory of the amateur.

Tichy presents us with a constant process of working and reworking, distressing, retouching and redefining the finished photograph. They are filled with mistakes, flaws, erosions and aleatory events on the surface of the image. However, unlike the amateur, Tichy's images are very consciously and meticulously worked on. If there are flaws in the presentation of the material, this is due to aging, unavailability of materials, the necessity of hiding them, mounting them on whatever material is available at the time. Whatever finds its way into Tichy's frame is no accident.

Ultimately, the more time we spend with these relics of a slowly dissolving past, the more beautiful and fascinating they become.

- Frances Guerin

(Images top-btottom: Miroslav Tichý, Untitled (announcement); @Foundation Tichy Ocean; Courtesy of Centre Pompidou); Miroslav Tichý Inv. Nr. 1-30, 15 x 18,5cm,  courtesy Foundation Tichy Ocean; Miroslav Tichý Inv. Nr. 1-37, 13 x 19cm,  courtesy Foundation Tichy Ocean; Miroslav Tichý (shown with camera), photo by Roman Buxbaum, © 1987, courtesy Foundation Tichy Ocean)