Boris Mikhailov

photographer

Boris Mikhailov is considered one of the most important post-Soviet artists in both the Western and Eastern canons of contemporary photography.
Born in Kharkov in the former USSR, his career has spanned Soviet control of his country to the declaration of Ukrainian independence.
Incorporating diverse photographic strategies, aesthetics and subject matter, he has created a challenging and wide-ranging body of work, noted for its critique of Soviet life, its contemplation of social change after the fall of communism, and its broader, ongoing examination of the role of both the photographer and the photograph in different political, geographical and social contexts.
From the outset, Mikhailov’s work challenged the rules that defined what was acceptable as art under the Soviet regime. At the age of 27, Mikhailov took his first photograph – a portrait of a ‘sensual and Western-looking woman smoking a cigarette’. Despite attempts to exhibit it in public, the photograph was repeatedly rejected because its subject matter was deemed inappropriate. A few years later, when officials discovered nude photos of his wife among his private documents at work, he was fired from the state-owned camera factory where he had been employed as a technical engineer. Nevertheless, around 1967 he decided to devote himself exclusively to the medium, beginning a career as a commercial photographer on the black market and pursuing his own artistic projects privately.
Bypassing the heavily censored, state-sponsored channels for making and showing photographs – namely camera clubs, magazines and public exhibitions – Mikhailov turned to a more radical and underground culture to distribute his work. He participated in clandestine exhibitions held in private homes, known as ‘kitchen shows’.
Here he began to gain recognition for his work and found himself for the first time in the company of like-minded artists critical of Soviet life.
It was at one of these exhibitions that Mikhailov met the Russian artist Ilya Kabokov, who had a significant influence on the development of his work and introduced him to the wider Moscow scene of dissident artists and intellectuals.
Mikhailov’s photographic projects have almost always taken the form of extended series, often completed over several years, which vary greatly in their formal aspects, conceptual strategies and subject matter.
The key to understanding much of Mikhailov’s work is to appreciate the extent to which he was responding, directly and indirectly, to the controls and restrictions placed on photographic practice in the USSR. Any photograph that questioned Soviet power or way of life, any depiction of the naked body, and the very act of taking photographs without permission in most public spaces was strictly forbidden. Meanwhile, official images of the idealised Soviet citizen were everywhere in the culture, portraying something that Mikhailov and many others felt was far removed from their own reality.
In the midst of these conditions, Mikhailov set about making his early works, the Red Series (1968-1975), Luriki (1971-1985) and Sots Art (1975-1986), each of which experimented with aesthetic devices such as a snapshot style of photography, hand-colouring of images and the re-appropriation of found photographs to articulate his dissatisfaction with the Soviet status quo.
The Red Series juxtaposes dreary, prosaic moments of communist life with the crowning visual symbol of Soviet power and control – the colour red. Both Luriki and Sots Art play sarcastically with the Russian tradition of hand-colouring photographs, transforming this popular aesthetic into a means of critiquing idealisation and representation. Of all his projects, these three are most closely associated with the work of the Moscow Conceptualists, a group of artists including Ilya Kabokov, Eric Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev who sought to comment radically and ironically on the legacy of the Russian avant-garde and social realism in order to address the failures and hypocrisies of their society.
The next important phase of Mikhailov’s work, which includes the projects Unfinished Dissertation (1985) and Salt Lake (1986), explored ways of questioning the stability and objectivity of more traditional photojournalistic images. Unfinished Dissertation combines black and white photographs with sloppily handwritten text in no discernible relationship to one another, epitomising the futility of subjectivity in an environment where it is not allowed to exist. Displayed on the back of a long and unfinished academic dissertation that Mikhailov stumbled upon in the rubbish, the work irreverently exposes authority, meaning and truth as little more than a façade. Salt Lake takes as its subject bathers on the shores of a lake near Slavjansk. What might at first appear to be idyllic images of a summer outing, on closer inspection reveals another crack in the myth of Soviet utopia – as the viewer slowly realises that the lake is surrounded by a dirty and inhospitable industrial landscape.
As dramatic historical changes unfolded around him – the fall of communism and the declaration of Ukrainian independence – Mikhailov’s photographic work kept pace. His most acclaimed post-Soviet bodies of work, By the Ground (1991) and Case History (1997-1998), document the uneasy transition from a socialist to a capitalist model of society. By the Ground consists of street scenes in Kharkov and Moscow shot from a camera held at waist level and pointed downward. The melodramatic formal qualities of the panoramic, sepia-toned images, in contrast to the banality of the scenes portrayed, skilfully parallel the tension felt between the promise of freedom and the slow and complicated momentum towards tangible social and political change. Undoubtedly Mikhailov’s best-known and most controversial work, Case History unflinchingly records the plight of the newly created homeless population known as the bomzhes. Diseased bodies, depraved sexuality, lawless children, feral animals and appallingly desperate living conditions are the subject of nearly 500 documentary-style colour photographs. When asked about his subjects’ reaction to being photographed, Mikhailov explains: “Most of the time they were more interested in contact and conversation and in the help they could get, but sometimes they wanted the situation they were in to be known, so that someone would take an interest in it”. (”A conversation between Boris Mikhailov and Jan Kaila’’)
Critics were quick to point out the fine ethical line that the work treads – as Mikhailov paid his subjects to pose and often directed their performances on camera. Some expressed outrage at the sensationalist, voyeuristic portrayal of tragic circumstances for a Western audience, while others defended the work as an important socio-historical record and a desperate cry for help.
Mikhailov’s career spans more than 50 years and he continues to exhibit and publish widely in both East and West. He has received many prestigious international awards, including the Coutts Contemporary Art Award, the Hasselblad Award and the Citibank Photography Prize.