Czech Photographer's Cameras Made From Trash Still Capture Pretty Ladies Just Fine

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No, this isn't an alternate Waterworld costume for Dennis Hopper-it's Miroslav Tichy, posing with one of his amazing trash cams, which he fabricated from paper towel tubes, thread spools, rubber bands and other bits of detritus and has used since the 1950s. Now in his 80s, Tichy and his works have only recently (as far as the art world goes) been discovered. And like all good photographers, he trained his intentionally imperfect camera rigs on the considerably more refined female form.

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A little more analog than the amazing HD trash projectors we've seen, but that's exactly the point; Tichy described his trash cams as being the only way to add enough poetic imperfections to photography, describing his philosophy with the fantastic maxim: "If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world."

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His subject matter was mostly regular folks in his small Czech town doing what they do, and naturally he gravitated toward the ladies, who look great in Tichy's proto-Lomography style.

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There's currently an exhibition of Tichy's work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that looks fantastic. Check it out if you're in the vicinity. [The Online Photographer, Tichyocean.ch, Centre Pompidou via Kottke]

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