Pierre Molinier

Pierre Molinier began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.

Molinier began to take photographs at the age of 18. When Molinier's sister died in 1918, he had sex with her corpse when he was left alone to photograph it. "Even dead," he said, "she was beautiful. I shot sperm on her stomach and legs, and onto the First Communion dress she was wearing. She took with her into death the best of me."

Molinier started his erotic production around 1950. With the aid of a wide range of specially made "props" – dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, dildos and an occasional confidante – Molinier focused upon his own body as the armature for a constructive form that ultimately produced a large body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.

He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group.

In the 1970's, Molinier's health began to decline. He lost the will to live after he was no longer able to maintain an erection. Like his father before him, Pierre Molinier committed suicide at 76 years of age by self-inflicted gunshot wound while masturbating.


Samples:

Evidence

In 1977 photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies, and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments--as evidence, in short. Selecting 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence.


Some samples:




New edition available at Amazon.com

Miroslav Tichy

Miroslav Tich was born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic, and studied at the Academy of Art in Prague. After the communist takeover, he is widely reported to have spent as many as eight years in detention camps and mental hospitals. In the late 1950s, he began to make photographs with cameras he designed himself, salvaging their lenses from eyeglasses and making their bodies from tin cans, toilet-paper rolls and cigarette boxes. He chose his subjects from the streets and from public and private spaces of his small town, where he is not a favorite with the ladies--some have reported his peeping-tom-like activity to the police. The resulting images, grainy and often overexposed, cropped and developed at home, framed on card stock, decorated in pencil, and then left to deteriorate around Tich 's house, are haunting.



Tichy's homemade camera:



Some samples:





(via Amazon)