Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkiv (Ukraine, 1938). Although his recognition was relatively late, he has won, among other awards, the Hasselblad Prize, considered the Nobel Prize for photography.
Mikhailov has lived through Communism, the Second World War, the fall of the USSR, and life as an emigrant in Berlin. Throughout this trajectory, his art has persevered as a photographic exercise against the times, against the history that has been instilled in us as invariable, against the political commandments in use. He has also swum against the tide of those sublimating photography as an absolute document of reality or an imperturbable monument of truth.
He has kept his position in the face of Stalinism or the shock therapy of post-communism; in the face of Western media fantasies and the standardized morality of contemporary societies. Mikhailov was no stranger to communist censorship or the Chernobyl catastrophe; nor the German tourism in Mallorca nor the daily life of different Soviet generations. He pioneered the photographic representation of the male nude in the form of the self-portrait.
His work is crossed by irony, rawness, sensuality, naivety, and integrity: artistic and human. In many ways, it is possible to say that Boris Mikhailov’s life is his work. Zigzagging between the beautiful and the sinister, his biography can be guessed in each of his series. Such was the case of Red, a series developed in the USSR, during the seventies and eighties, when he had to devote himself to making portraits of popular parties and weddings to earn a living, since he could not do that in an artistic medium in which he was censored. Perhaps without knowing it at the time, with this set of portraits (in which the red color of communism always prevails, sometimes shining and sometimes faded) he created a unique archive of the daily life of the Soviets.
Case History, probably his most famous series, made him internationally known and describes, unlike the previous one, the results of the collapse of the Soviet Union in his native Ukraine. With people evicted by the two opposing worlds in the Cold War. It revolves around a black hole through which the communist utopia and the liberal post-utopia ended up throwing themselves without any kind of cushioning. Mikhailov has remained, definitively, as the photographer of those beings with no place in history or post-history. A contemporary Balzac who, camera in hand, has dedicated himself to portraying this human comedy of lost illusions.
This trajectory cannot be understood without tracing what counterculture was under socialism. From the testimonies of Limonov (born in Kharkiv, like Mikhailov), we have learned that the underground in the USSR was not only censored in the Soviet period but was also unceremoniously swept away in the post-Soviet period. This paradox, so present in Mikhailov’s work, has been addressed by some films and documentaries from other Eastern experiences, as is the case of Marten Persiel’s documentary This Ain’t California, which reconstructs the life of a group of skaters in communist Berlin.
Was there a counterculture within socialism? Of course there was. It’s just that counterculture has almost always been explained from a Western point of view. Often, its critique has been validated, forgiving that many of these artists maintained a fluid relationship with the market. Under socialism, the countercultural condition of many movements has been denied because of the closeness of any activity of their art to the state. Let us remember that, from different positions, Boris Groys or Martin Amis have expressed this fatality to explain the avant-garde, socialist realism, or Stalinism itself.
A negligent double standard that hides more than it explains.
And so, we come to Temptation of Death, a series that combines Mikhailov looking back (to Ukraine, to the ruins) and a break with his way of working, photographing and even mounting or exhibiting his pieces. His return to a half-finished crematorium in Soviet Kyiv, not only reflects an important episode of the funerary culture of that system but also its subsequent abandonment by the authorities, who went so far as to hide it behind a wall that is an allegory of the life and decline of that society. We are talking about a crematorium that was born as dead as the corpses it was destined to set on fire.
Mikhailov reencounters this landscape in 2017. And, just where he had made his famous series Case History, which captured the human degradation of post-communist Ukraine, he now reencounters an equally appalling physical and architectural collapse.
In the British Journal of Photography, we can read that this series was part of an original plan, entitled Wall of Remembrance, by artists Ada Rybachuk and Vladimir Melnichenko. But Mikhailov, according to curator Francesco Zanot, manages to reverse it with a dystopian atmosphere “halfway between a science fiction film and the organic profile of the Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut.”
The impact of this landscape led the photographer to think not only about the gloomy space in front of him but also about his previous work. So he conceived a combination of present and past—which justifies the figure of the diptych—from which a future that is no more encouraging is insinuated.
It is not difficult to evoke—in this “short novel” that condenses his life and work according to the photographer himself—the persistent tragedy that goes from Chernobyl to the current war in Ukraine, from the Soviet world to its dissolution in a failed post-communism, from the dreams of reaching the cosmos to this nightmare crashed on the dead ground of a dead asylum.
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