I’m in NY, so I thought I’d check out the Twilight Visions show at the ICP. The subtitle sounded good: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris. Kertesz, Brassai, Man Ray… Photographers I’ve liked enough at some point or other. But wow, was it boring. I’m not sure why exactly, it somehow seemed anachronistic without being particularly charming. Or maybe I’ve changed.

Now, what WAS interesting was the Miroslav Tichy show, also showing there on the main floor (that’s him in the photo). I didn’t expect to like his work. I’d read about his wildly eccentric and shabby persona, his deliberately flawed (even mutilated) prints, homemade cameras from all kinds of unlikely junk… Also his clearly voyeuristic tendencies that made a lot of people (not least his subjects on the street, at the swimming pool) uncomfortable. Is it art, or is he no better than the proverbial guy looking up skirts with a mirror on his shoe? Is he simply mentally ill?

But give it a chance, the work and the man are pretty intriguing. For sure Tichy is a true artist at his core, funny, intelligent in a profound way, and if he’s being somewhat hyped by the art world at his ripe old age of 80-something, consider it his due. Yes, looking at his pictures he does like his women, no doubt. And his backstory does point to some mental illness, though how much is a response to living under totalitarian conditions is unclear.

But there’s an undeniable genius at work too, uniquely Czech somehow. In some ways he’s of the breed of Josef Koudelka, Vojta Dukat, and others who, like Tichy, built much of their work on a stubborn rejection of modernity to the point of spending their lives as true outsiders.

So, one show I expected to like and didn’t, and another I expected not to like and did.