BORIS MIKHAILOV

ONE OF THE GREAT EASTERN-EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHERS, HE DOCUMENTED THE LIVES OF HIS FELLOW UKRAINIANS, MARKED BY THE FALL OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE. THIS AUTUMN, HIS WORK IS BEING SHOWN IN PARIS AT THE MAISON EUROPÉENNE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE AND THE BOURSE DE COMMERCE.

Boris Mikhailov was born in 1938, in Kharkiv, USSR, today Ukraine’s second city, which has been mercilessly bombed by Russia since the outbreak of war in February. Mikhailov must have seen bombs too: when the Germans invaded Ukraine, in 1941, he and his mother took refuge in the Urals. After the war, he returned to his hometown, where he remained until 1997, leaving for Berlin six years after Ukraine’s independence. In the 1960s, when he became a photographer, he printed a shot of a rather Western-looking woman smoking a cigarette. Considered shocking, it found no place in Soviet photography, which resembled propaganda with its fertile landscapes, lyrical still lifes and cheerful, asexual labourers. At the time it was forbidden to: 1/ Photograph from higher than the first floor or take unauthorized pictures of railways, stations, factories or the areas surroundings factories, military zones or any state institution; 2/ Take photographs that could undermine Soviet power and the Soviet way of life; 3/ Photograph a naked body: only museums were authorized to exhibit such images, and only when produced by masters. Mikhailov took no notice, freely photographing what he pleased: the KGB confiscated a series of nude pictures of his wife inspired by Western magazines; in Soviet iconography, women were represented as

androgynous, asexual emblems of a robust workforce. He was fired from his job, which led him to become an independent commercial photographer and photo editor, while continuing with his own work on the side.

The essence of Mikhailov’s approach is to be found in the scars left by the Soviet empire and the absurdity of life. From Khrushchev to Putin, he has never ceased to denounce the idiocy of those in power. Many of his series are inspired by communist ideology, for example the Red Series (1968–75), featuring prints in which the colour red dominates – the colour of communism, of martyrs’ blood and of the flame of faith. We see official ceremonies, gatherings of the elderly, festivities, agricultural exhibitions, portraits of great men. A feeling of boredom prevails in these images that conform to the strict rules of Soviet photography. Earning his living as a commercial touch-up artist, he developed an innovative technique using family photos with the Louriki series (1971–85), long before other artists who made a career out of image reappropriation. “Using family albums and colourizing photos allows me to say more about the Soviet Union and its people than any of my previous series.” Here too, he followed the rules: cheeks are pink, grass is green and any physical imperfections erased.

The beach is an important part of life in Ukraine: located on the Black and Azov Seas, the country counts 2,780 km of coastline as well as countless lakes. Naturally, Mikhailov photographed these spaces of leisure where the body is free. In Berdiansk Beach (1981), his approach is classic, humanist, cinematographic, as though taking stock of the

situation before the great upheavals to come. We see hundreds of swimmers in bathing suits, whole families who have come to spend the day by the water, catching some sun next to the cars, enjoying innocent fun. Then, with Salt Lake (1986), he went one further with these familiar shots of sea- and lakeside vacations. Look closely at the landscape around the famous lake near Slavjansk, sought after for its warm salty waters, and you’ll see a number of factories as well as an enormous pipeline that discharges waste from a soda plant directly into the lake. Crowded round the spot where the pipe enters the water, none of the swimmers pays any attention, their indifference to their immediate surroundings an apt metaphor for the Soviets’ indifference toward pollution and environmental concerns.

After perestroika (1985–91) and its economic and social reforms came along, Mikhailov’s work took a more radical turn. Shot in his hometown, At Dusk (1993) comprises 111 small, hand-tinted panoramic photographs in which dark street scenes reveal the harsh realities of life in a newly independent, post-socialist country. Locals line up for food, huddle around makeshift fires or show off scarce consumer goods. And then there is the ruined cityscape: poorly-maintained roads, garbage overflowing in the streets, abandoned industrial sites. The poverty is underlined by the darkness of the images, taken at twilight, a moment of transition, and the impact is magnified by the very low vantage point, Mikhailov having photographed Kharkiv at hip level. In By The Ground (1996), he went even lower, as the title suggests, shooting Kharkiv and Moscow from the vantage point of the homeless living in their streets. These panoramic

photos, taken randomly, show dusty thoroughfares and cracked pavements, their sepia tones suggesting a kind of nostalgia. Mikhailov’s approach recalls the words of Aleksandr Rodchenko, one of great Soviet photographers: “The most interesting visual angles of our time are the bird’s and the worm’s.” Here we are all worms, contemplating the failings of the Soviet experiment. For both At Dusk and By the Ground, Mikhailov gave very precise display instructions: the prints had to be hung very low in a single line so that the viewer was forced to bend down to see them. “I always need a very saturated situation for a reportage, because it expresses a subjective view, a unique sensation of the world,” he explained. “What’s important is to represent not an event but its relationship to the world. And yet, I think its relationship should concern everybody. Even though a situation is represented from a personal point of view, it concerns common, shared social processes.”

After streetscapes, Mikhailov made the body the focus of his work. In Case History (1999), a 500-photo series, he shot those marginalized by society: we see close-ups of dirty toothless mouths, a half-naked Red Army officer, bellies covered with abcesses, men carrying animal carcasses, a girl with a swollen face, the queue for a soup kitchen, street children smoking, drunken bodies sprawled out on the asphalt. These harsh images, which are often difficult to look at, are in colour, a way of highlighting the violence at work between rich and poor. “Both rich and poor want colour photos,” he explained. “The rich could afford them, the poor couldn’t.” Sometimes Mikhailov includes himself and his wife in the scene, and always paid his models: “Manipulating

people with money has become a new kind of legal relationship that is spreading throughout the former USSR.” His subjects embody the stigmata of regime change: former engineers, soldiers and civil servants, abandoned, burned out and left behind by economic reforms. “Case History causes no harm to the people photographed. In Ukraine, there are no material traces of the past, and it is my duty to document for future generations society’s attitude toward the homeless. As for the morality of paying these people to pose, it would be immoral not to pay them.”

Mikhailov’s disturbing images found an audience on the international scene. His first foreign exhibition was at Gothenburg’s Hasselblad Center, in 1991, and was soon followed by others all over the world. In 2017, he represented Ukraine at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. In the 1990s, he began, with humour and derision, to photograph his own body, questioning machismo, canons of beauty and the vanity of an old man in the series I am Not (1992). He also experimented with superimposition, printing two slides on top of each other in Yesterday Sandwich (2009), a hymn to analogue photography. He takes pleasure in manipulating the sordid reality of the world, making the viewer feel all the weight of guilt and voyeurism. More than just a documentary photographer, Mikhailov is an active participant, involved in what he shows, even if that means distorting the image. But he doesn’t bother to hide the manipulation, thereby adding yet greater strength to his work and, with provocation and humour, flipping the bird at political correctness. “There’s one thing I’ve never understood: why do I look at everything through a woman’s behind?”