Images courtesy of the Tichý Ocean Foundation tichyocean.com

Miroslav Tichý — The Outsider Artist

Watching Tarzan Retired — Roman Buxbaum’s 2004 documentary portrait of Miroslav Tichý — is where this account begins. What the film reveals is not easily forgotten.

An eccentric old man enters his home, his clothes worn to rags, his beard and hair untouched for what seems like ages. To an outsider, the house appears to be a pure disaster, a kingdom ruled by chaos. He lived in poverty, on the margins of society. Photographs lay scattered everywhere — stuffed into shelves, boxes, and drawers — while old paintings, buried beneath layers of dust, had slowly turned grey with time. This was a man who seemed to hold nothing of importance, someone who believed the world itself was an illusion, built entirely on appearances.

Each day, he set out on his walks — not simply to let time pass, but carrying with him his homemade camera. He photographed the everyday world, a world where everything already existed, and pressed the shutter release almost instinctively. Over the course of five years, he is said to have taken nearly one hundred photographs a day. Later, in the solitude of the darkroom, he would study them beneath an enlarger.

His films were developed in buckets or in a bathtub during the night in his courtyard. Some negatives were left submerged for hours; sometimes days passed before he returned to them. Afterwards, he hung them on a laundry line to dry. Yet even then, the photographs held little importance to him. It was simply something he did, almost without thought or ambition. And still, through this careless devotion, he transformed the ordinary into art.

There is a saying that the line between sanity and madness is as thin as a strand of hair. Miroslav Tichý lived somewhere along that fragile border. Born in Czechoslovakia under communist rule, his life was far from easy — shaped by harsh times and by a society that treated him as an outsider. He believed that perfection in something beautiful holds no interest for the eye. It is the imperfection that becomes more interesting, more human, more true. His neighbours saw him as eccentric, sometimes a nuisance. He was indifferent to fame or recognition. He barely preserved his own work — photographs scattered across floors and shelves, left to curl, decay, or burn in his stove for warmth.

Tichý never sought an audience. He never curated, never archived, never explained himself. That any of it survived is largely due to Roman Buxbaum — a childhood friend and Czech-Swiss psychiatrist who returned from exile in Switzerland in 1981 and discovered thousands of handmade prints and cameras scattered across Tichý’s home. Where Tichý saw nothing worth keeping, Buxbaum saw a life’s work. He spent the next two decades preserving and organizing the collection, and later documented their story in Tarzan Retired, his 2004 portrait of the man he had known since youth. It was the curator Harald Szeemann who ultimately brought Tichý’s work to the international stage — introducing it to the world at the 2004 Seville Biennial. His photographs exist because two people understood their value before the world did.

“Photography is something concrete. Photography is perception, the eye — that which you can see. To achieve that you need a bad camera. Photography means painting with light.” (Miroslav Tichý — Tarzan Retired, 2004, dir. Roman Buxbaum)

Anna, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.