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Indepth Arts News:
"Boris Mikhailov: Case Study"
2000-04-07 until 2000-05-21
Photographers Gallery
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
That the photographs of Boris Mikhailov have, for over thirty
years, explored the position of the individual within the
historical workings of public ideology is unsurprising, given
how he started. A technical engineer by training, he was
introduced to the camera in his late Twenties when he was
officially requested to make an educational film about the
factory in which he worked. It was not long after this that the
KGB found some nude photographs which Mikhailov had
taken of his wife and, as such images were deemed
pornographic and therefore banned, he was immediately
removed from his job. He decided that he would devote
himself to photography from then on and, in the intervening
decades, he has become, along with his old friend Ilya
Kabakov, one of the most important artists to have emerged
from the former Soviet Union.
Since then, Mikhailov has always worked in series and a broad
range of these are included in this exhibition, his first solo
show in a public gallery in Britain. All of them explore the
position of the individual within the sphere of a public
ideology, whether communism or capitalism. This is evident in
the Red Series (1968-75), where Mikhailov documents the
slogans and symbols of the Soviet era as heroic backdrops to
the mundanities of everyday life, and Private Series, which is
more intimate, less public, but where the official iconography
of the Soviet state can still be seen behind people as they
dance or socialise within their own apartments. Crimean
Snobbery, from the mid-1970s, is a more poetic meditation
upon friendship and love, appearing almost like faded stills
from a forgotten film of the nouvelle vague. In all these
works, however, we find the same concerns: 'the past,
relation to tradition, recent and long gone, the relation
between what is social and what is personal, the sphere of the
public and the sphere of the intimate', as critic Lech
Lechowicz has noted.
These themes reappear in Case History (1999) arguably his
most important work. Both unflinching and despairing, this
project explores the break-up of the Soviet Union by
focussing on its human consequences, the bomzhes, or
homeless. The familiar figures of much 'humanitarian' social
documentary, the homeless in Mikhailov's pictures become
players in some existential tragedy, given money by the artist
to be photographed, sometimes clothed, sometimes naked,
or somewhere in between. The manipulation of people with
money has become a new form of social relation in the former
USSR - in this sense it has 'caught up' with the 'West' - and it is
a relation which has infiltrated this project to its ice-cold heart.
Perhaps at no other time has a photographer approached
human subjects with such an unflinching, morally complex,
and powerful gaze.
Boris Mikhailov was born in 1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine, where
he continues to live and work. In recent years, he has
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Kunsthalle, Zurich,
Portikus, Frankfurt, and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
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