showing now: a solid, if familiar, assemblage of surrealist images of paris in the 1920s and 30s (man ray, brassaï...a personal favorite is andré kertész's rue vavin, paris 1925); a set of prints by eugène atget that offer a dreamy historical record of the city of lights; and a collection of miroslav tichý's photographs (crudely printed, mostly of women, taken surreptitiously). i can see why some consider the work "stalker-esque" and creepy...but i love the evocative blur in so many of them.
it was said that tichy's photographs exemplify the "infra-ordinary" -- french novelist georges perec's term for "that which passes when nothing passes. " perec wrote, in approaches to what?, "my intention is to describe what remains, that which we generally don't notice, which doesn't call attention to itself, which is of no importance, what happens when nothing happens, what passes when nothing passes, except time, people, cars and clouds."
agree or disagree with whether or not tichy achieves this, but i think it's a worthy challenge...
***
on my way home, i tried to practice "follow-focusing" with my 50mm. at night, this is quite a trick. so i wound up with a lot of mistakes including these--they have a kind of "tichy blur"?
i don't think i can get away with quite this much of it though. oh well.
42nd street/6th avenue, nyc.
wondering...does black & white help or hurt?
