Introduction

Boris Mikhailov
(1938, Kharkov, Ukraine / works in Kharkov, Ukraine and Berlin, Germany)

Boris Mikhailov is generally recognized as one of the most important and influential photographers from the former Soviet Union. Unlike a lot of artists from his generation like Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, who moved from Ukraine to Moscow and then quite quickly emigrated to the West, Boris Mikhailov kept on living and working in the somewhat anonymous city of Kharkov until well into the nineties. He was and still is attached to the vast and forgotten hinterland of the former Soviet Union; even though he now lives in Berlin, he regularly spends time in his native town.

Mikhailov, who was trained as a technical engineer, started to make photographs around 1965. He lost his job in 1966 after the KGB discovered that he had taken nude pictures of his wife with a camera that belonged to his employer, and subsequently started to work as an independent photographer. For years, he earned a living making enlargements and retouching snap shots and family pictures. His clients used them in their homes and hung the photographs on the walls like ersatz paintings. This generally accepted way of retouching photographs, a kind of photoshopping avant-la-lèttre, gave people the feeling that the ‘truth’ of a photographical image could be freely manipulated, an approach that paralleled some practices of the communist regime of that moment. The same regime of that epoch also defined that photographers were not allowed to take pictures of strategically important locations, pictures taken from anything higher than the second floor of a building, pictures that were a treat to the Soviet Union’s good reputation and nude pictures. Boris Mikhailov officially complied with those rules, albeit in a subtly critical way, except for the nude pictures.

From the late sixties, Mikhailov has developed a long list of thematically organized series. They are very different from each other; some show historical or documentary aspects, others are rather conceptual and still others betray Mikhailov’s good sense of humour. Therefor any overview of his oeuvre shows a great diversity. The artist states that he needs this diversity of images, pictures and series, like a sum of arguments that enable him to cast a shadow of doubt on the exactness or validity of one single view or perception. This approach may have a lot to do with an innate fear which is typical for artists in general – but it certainly is essential to understand those who worked in the former Soviet Union.

Many series Mikhailov has created are close to what is called ‘documentary photography’ in our contemporary western terminology. With his methods, the artist took the position of an anthropologist, someone who is observing the dynamics within a group. Mikhailov did not avoid any moral questions while doing so and he is very conscious of the difficult position he takes in relation to his subjects: “What is a photographer to do? How should I act as an artist? I was very well aware of the fact that taking pictures of the poverty I saw around me and that I could not deny, was my civil and professional duty. On the other hand I also understand the traditional critique which says that you should not use the misery of others.”

In his 40 year long career, Boris Mikhailov has accumulated an impressive list of prizes and exhibitions. He showed his work at the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in New York (1993 and 2011), at Portikus, Frankfurt (1995), at the Kunsthalle Zürich (1996), the DAAD-Galerie in Berlin (1997), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1998), the Sprengel Museum in Hannover (1998, 2007, 2011 and 2013), at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubliana (1999), at Tate Modern in London and at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2003), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2004), the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva (2005), the Biennials of Venice (2007, Ukrainian pavilion) and Sydney (1996 and 2000) and at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2012). In 2014 he participated at ‘Manifesta 10’ in Saint-Petersburg. In 2000 Boris Mikhailov won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for his oeuvre.