If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world

In my near-constant and endless wanderings through the virtual world, I recently discovered (thanks to Flashbak) the work of Miroslav Tichy, a Czech photographer who remained largely unknown until his photos were finally exhibited in 2004. Known as the "perverted flaneur," Tichy roamed the streets of his hometown Kyjov in the Czech Republic with large, ungainly homemade cameras fashioned out of cardboard, wire, tin cans, and spools of thread. The homemade cameras let small amounts of light leak onto the negatives, giving his work a hazy, dreamlike quality.

His preferred subject matter was women, and all of his shots are candid, voyeuristic photos taken surreptitiously on the street. He was likely able to get away with this because his cameras looked so shoddy most people assumed they were incapable of taking actual photos (see below).

Tichy, with one of his homemade cameras

Tichy had a refreshingly postmodern take on art and technique. Of photography, he said:

First of all, you have to have a bad camera and if you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.

This philosophy could just as readily be applied to the type of talentless fame we've come to expect from reality TV and middling pop stars. Hey, it worked for Meghan Trainor. If you can't be good, be bad. But don't just be bad, be the worst.

All of his photographs are untitled and undated, but span a time frame from roughly the 1960s through the 1980s. He died in 2011.

The swell of the hills soft like the flanks of massive animals

Her favorite artist was James Turrell.

On Friday a couple of friends and I are going to the De Young museum to sit in the sculpture garden with his "Three Gems" and a bottle of champagne.

Flo Fox

I became acquainted with the work of photographer Flo Fox after watching 'Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work'. Joan meets her while delivering a Thanksgiving meal as part of her volunteer work for God's Love, We Deliver. Flo is legally blind and wheelchair bound from symptoms of MS, and started taking photos with an auto-focus camera in the late 70s after failing eyesight made it impossible to continue working as a costume designer.  She has taken, by her estimation, over 100,000 photographs of life in New York since the late 70's. She shows Joan a series of photos she took of the same drugstore for 25 years, documenting the rise in the price of cigarettes. "Check me out," she says, before saying, very slowly and deliberately, "Flo-Fox-Dot-Com."

Her photos are moody, subtle, and always somehow shot through with a pang of raw humor (police blockades creating an accidental Star of David, man in assless leather chaps eating alone at a diner). Also, lots of dick pics, which she's been compiling for her yet-to-be-published tome, 'Dicthology'. She claims every man who has entered her apartment since the mid-70's has posed for the book. 'Atta girl.

In spite of some obsessive internet detective work, I wasn't able to find very many of her photographs online. Her website features a few, but sadly looks like it hasn't been updated since 1999, and hardly does them justice. She has created only one self-published book of her work, 'Asphalt Gardens: 69 Photographs by Flo Fox,' but it is long out-of-print (ps if you can find me one, I'll send you a puppy).

My favorite series is one she self-photographed for Playboy magazine. She was already nearly legally blind when these photos were taken. There's some nudity so I've hidden them after the jump.

South of Market

Saturday afternoon, Howard Street between 3rd and 4th Streets, 1981

Helen and her husband at the Helen Cafe 486 6th Street, 1980

Hamburger Mary's, 1582 Folsom St. at 12th Street, 1980

Transbay Terminal Newsstand, 1982

Langton between Folsom and Harrison Streets, 1979

Pat serving coffee at the Gordon Cafe on 7th Street at Mission Street, 1980

Skip Wheeler and his wife groom their horses after the Veteran's Day Parade, Folsom at 2nd Street, 1980

Office workers near the periphery of the new convention center, Minna at 4th Street, 1980

Across from the Moscone Center, 3rd at Tehama Street, 1980

Oh hey, look. It's SOMA not looking like ground zero for overfunded tech startups and $6,000 a month metrosexual apartment buildings. I hardly recognize it and yet I still do. It's like looking into the face of a familiar stranger. These photographs were taken around 1980, during and shortly after the construction of the Moscone Center, a massive redevelopment project that displaced residents and businesses in a 10 block radius. The people remaining on the fringes of this invading behemoth were about to have their lives changed by rising rents, gentrification, and an influx of new visitors from all over the country. It's the same old story. A few people win and many, many more lose. Looking at these photographs I am overcome with feelings of nostalgia for a place I never visited and people I never saw. It's a feeling peculiar to seeing old photographs of a dearly loved city.

The SOMA of my teens was still under-developed and strangely vacant. The long, lonely blocks stretched on and on into the abyss of Bayview and Hunter's Point. Many of the residents in these photographs were already long gone, but the crowd-sourced, on-demand cloud-based SaaS platform HQ's hadn't arrived in great numbers yet. It was a neighborhood on the cusp of change. And now that change has come, and people are angry. Do I blame them? It's hard not to look at these photographs of what still looks like an old fashioned, quintessentially Great American City and feel pangs of remorse. What hath we wrought now, with our tone deaf, homogenized luxury high rises and artisanal conflict-free coffee shops?

But isn't it just as pointless and self-indulgent to bemoan the changing face of a metropolis as it is to loathe the changing of seasons? Both are equally inevitable and unstoppable. Yet people throw bricks at Google buses, and the past is still held up as a bastion of now unattainable societal perfection. I keep thinking I've heard this storyline before. Even this blog post has been written before, thousands of times, by people who are smarter, more astute than myself. I don't think I know the answer. How does a city remain resolutely unique and true to itself while having to absorb the collective sameness of an invading population, all drawn to it for the same reason? Can a city remain affordable and welcoming to a working class population even as the tech upperclass eliminates their jobs with ever more automated food/shopping/ridesharing apps? The truth is, I don't know, but I secretly hope we can pull it off. I hope we can retain some of the texture and grit of the San Francisco of Ye Olde Days even as venture capitalists sink 55 million dollars into a startup that inserts gifs into your email. Because they both have their merits.

Google maps

It shouldn't ever cease to be amazing, and miraculous even, that an army of robotic Google vehicles have painstakingly mapped and stitched together digital images of the entire developed world. While most people look up directions or check out building facades, Jon Rafman is in search of something more poignant. Scouring the 3D images, he finds fleeting moments captured completely by accident. Sometimes it feels as though the individuals in the images are defiant, distrustful of the 9-camera robots stealing their likeness. Sometimes they seem to be knowing participants. Either way, the tableaus created often carry a visual weight that it seems neither the Google cameras nor their subjects anticipate. Whether they capture a lone upturned vehicle, a herd of horses grazing outside a cemetery, or a lone baby crawling outside of a Gucci store, these images say a lot about our current world and its many versions of daily, mundane life.

  All images via Jon Rafman's 9 Eyes project

Things, organized

All images via Things Organized Neatly
Listen, don't get me wrong, I love minimalism. I aspire to live in a white concrete room with lucite furniture and white accessories as much as the next guy, but my god, what an exhausting process that must be to continually re-edit your possessions. Far better to afford yourself the luxury of flotsam and jetsam and just keep it beautifully organized.

Besides, I'm more stimulated by the process of laying out, selecting, and organizing than I am the messy, amorphous act of creation. I'm way too anal.

Betsy Youngquist

I came across the work of artist Betsy Youngquist at Jazzfest this year, and as soon as I spotted her creepy, heavily beaded little creatures peering at me with taxidermy eyeballs, I fell in love. She has more work featured on her website, and an etsy shop where some pieces are available for sale. I so very badly want a set of her wall eyes.