Women of Kyjov is an editorial title used by PhotoAnthology to identify a historically documented body within Miroslav Tichý’s photographic work. It was not a series formally titled or organized by Tichý himself. The designation refers to his sustained practice, chiefly from the late 1960s through the 1980s, of photographing women and girls encountered in everyday life in Kyjov, Moravia.
Emerging after Tichý's academic study of the female nude and retreat from official art structures, the work treats woman as a recurring motif while examining movement, chance, and imperfection. Its setting under late Czechoslovak socialism brings provincial civic life into view. Yet the covert method makes gendered looking central. Critics have variously addressed eroticism, anonymity, voyeurism, intrusion, and the viewer's complicity. Tichý called himself an observer, leaving unresolved the tension between formal attention and his subjects' agency.
That tension shapes the images' visual language. Women walk, wait, shop, sit, sunbathe, or push prams, usually without posing. They appear at a distance, through fencing, across streets, or from low angles. Crops isolate faces, torsos, legs, breasts, or buttocks, while blur and skewed framing turn fleeting glimpses into unstable compositions. The largely monochrome prints carry uneven exposure, light leaks, dust, stains, scratches, rough edges, and a muted, hazy atmosphere.
To shape this appearance, Tichý built or modified cameras from wood, cardboard, plywood, and found parts, fitting them with spectacle lenses or hand-ground Plexiglas polished with toothpaste and cigarette ash. He sometimes concealed a camera beneath his sweater or aimed it from his chest without using a viewfinder. In a shed converted into a darkroom, he processed film and printed with a homemade enlarger. Prints were rarely repeated. Cropping, pencil additions, occasional color, and handmade paper or cardboard mounts extended each image into a singular object.
Public recognition began when Harald Szeemann presented the photographs at the 2004 Seville Biennale, where Tichý received the New Discovery Award. Kunsthaus Zürich mounted his first solo museum exhibition in 2005, followed by exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and MMK Frankfurt in 2008 and ICP in New York in 2010. MMK acquired 80 works, while the 2008 book Miroslav Tichý: Dedicated to the Women of Kyjov gave the editorial formulation wider circulation.
