Boris Mikhailov: Photographic Provocateur

 

[I’m not usually a fan of art photography, but when I read this article on the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov, I was fascinated by his vision.  I’d never heard of Mikhailov before, so I filled out the post with a brief bio of the artist and a little blurb on the venue of his current exhibit.  (It’s in Paris, tant pis.)]

“A SUBVERSIVE LENS ON UKRAINE”
By Jason Farago 

[Jason Farago’s “A Subversive Lens on Ukraine” was published in the New York Times on 2 November 2022 (Section C [“Arts”]).  It was accompanied by several reproductions of Mikhailov’s photographs from the exhibit, Ukrainian Diary, which are also included in the online version of the article: The Life’s Work of Boris Mikhailov: Photography’s Great Trickster, and Ukraine’s Greatest Artist - The New York Times (nytimes.com).]

In Paris, a new exhibition features the life’s work of Boris Mikhailov, photography’s great trickster.

PARIS — A new nation needs heroes; but when the mayhem comes suddenly, you take whatever heroes you can get. In 1991, as the Soviet Union lurched to dissolution and Ukraine prepared to declare independence, the photographer Boris Mikhailov fabricated a new self-portrait, wearing a military uniform and looking straight-on like a Moscow official. [He looks a little like Sean Penn, I think.] But on his green jacket, traditional Ukrainian embroidery had been slapped on top of the Soviet insignia. The background was a sickly, Pop-pink sherbet. The airbrushing was so over-the-top, the eyes so blue, the lips so rouged, that he looked like a porcelain doll. Here was a “National Hero” for Ukraine’s year zero, but he was not convincing anyone of his valor.

A counterfeit hero: I can think of worse descriptions of Boris Mikhailov, Ukraine’s most influential artist, and the sparkiest and most unpredictable photographer to have emerged from Eastern Europe during the Communist era. In the 1960s and 1970s, working in Kharkiv outside official Soviet structures, he devised a new photographic manner that availed itself of cheapness and low finish to discreetly disparage the regime. Later, in independent Ukraine, he pictured the chaos of economic liberalization in visceral images that pushed the ethical complications of social documentary to the breaking point. His art is mordant. Untrustworthy. At times delirious. It is, also, some of the profoundest art made anywhere in Europe in the past 60 years.

“Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary,” which opened recently at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (M.E.P. [European House of Photography; 7 September 2022-15 January 2023]) in Paris, is the biggest show of his life and — to spell it out — arrives as Ukrainian culture receives attention for the worst possible reason. It includes no fewer than 800 photographs, covering almost all of the series he undertook before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are burlesque self-portraits, but also straight reportage from the 2013-14 Maidan Uprising in Kyiv. Conceptual mockery of “lousy” Soviet pictures, as well as aching collages of poetry and everyday snaps. Preparations for the show were well underway when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the war has reformatted “Ukrainian Diary” into a show of improbable resistance: to Soviet repression and now to Russian historical revisionism, to the fraudulence of official Communist art and to the global market’s appetite for trauma porn.

[According to Wikipedia: “Euromaidan, or the Maidan Uprising, was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government's sudden decision not to sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU, while Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it. 

[“The scope of the protests widened, with calls for the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych and the Azarov Government. The protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption, the influence of oligarchs, abuse of power, and violation of human rights in Ukraine. Transparency International named Yanukovych as the top example of corruption in the world. The violent dispersal of protesters on 30 November caused further anger. The Euromaidan led to the 2014 Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Revolution).”]

Separately, two other Paris institutions zoom in on two series Mikhailov shot in the first years of Ukrainian independence. The Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce has hung the twilit, blue-tinged panoramas of “At Dusk” (1993), whose wintry obscurity outlines the violent transition to a market economy. And Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, in the Marais district [historic district of Paris in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Rive Droite, or Right Bank, of the Seine], is displaying dozens of photographs from “Case History” (1997-98), Mikhailov’s most famous and most controversial series — in which the wretched, the drunk and the homeless of the new capitalist Ukraine take on the roles of martyred saints and holy fools.

This summer, after spending several weeks in Kyiv, I met Mikhailov and his wife, Vita, at their home in west Berlin. It was an anxious time for them: overloaded, disquieted, with overlapping pressures from work and home. Until the pandemic, the Mikhailovs had been regularly commuting between the German capital and Kharkiv, which lies just 25 miles from the Russian border. Now, Ukraine’s second city was being flattened; shells were landing daily, even as western Ukraine found an unsteady calm. The neighborhood of their Kharkiv apartment had recently been bombed; much of Boris’s archive is there, and they knew nothing of its fate.

“War kills our life,” Mikhailov told me in Russian, his native language — which Vita translated for me with varying degrees of fidelity. (A Times researcher translated Mikhailov’s quotes for this article.) “It kills the meaning of life, it kills the past, it kills the future. It kills everything. And now everything is different.”

He was leafing through a proof of the M.E.P.’s catalog, and asking himself if the invasion had nullified this summation of his life’s work. “There are times when something stays, and times when it doesn’t,” he sighed at one point, doubting whether his images from the Soviet era would mean anything to young people today. “Maybe they will find something new. If not” — and here he switched to English — “bye-bye!”

But to judge from the crowded galleries in Paris this week, Mikhailov’s art has indeed found a young audience, not least for the experimental images of the 1960s and ’70s that filleted Soviet ideology with a light touch and acrid wit. I mingled with dozens of lycée students who were engrossed in his double-exposure color images that superimpose nudes, religious imagery and other forbidden material onto pictures of abundant wheat fields or Khrushchev-era apartment blocks [Nikita Khrushchev, 1894-1971; First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (de facto head of state): 1953-64]. They pored over his “Black Archive,” shot clandestinely in Kharkiv between 1968 and 1979, in which young women smoke, grandmothers dance, and Mikhailov poses nude in a chintzy living room, flashing a wicked grin.

These unofficial pictures were printed on cheap paper; they incorporated blurs and backlighting and too much headroom; the nudes, especially, could have gotten him packed to Siberia. Mikhailov, along with other artists of what’s now known as the Kharkiv School of Photography, could exhibit only in private, usually in friends’ kitchens. (“They were free artists,” Vita said, “because they didn’t think, ‘We should sell for money.’”) And the lack of public opportunities, not to mention a market, inspired a self-sufficiency guarded long after the Soviet censors faded from view.

Mikhailov was born to a family of engineers in Kharkiv in 1938, between two atrocities. A few years before his birth was the Holomodor, Stalin’s orchestrated famine, which killed nearly 4 million Ukrainians as collective punishment for their belief in cultural and political autonomy [Joseph Stalin, 1878-1953; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1922-52]. By 1941, Mikhailov’s father (who was from the Donbas) had enlisted as a Red Army officer, while his mother (born in a shtetl [Jewish village or small town in Eastern Europe] near Kyiv) escaped west with young Boris just before the Nazis entered Kharkiv and slaughtered the city’s Jews. He remembers the sirens from those early days, he said; the current invasion is not his first.

Kharkiv, even more than Kyiv, had been the crucible of the Ukrainian avant-garde in the first years of the Soviet Union. It was the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the proving ground of wildly ambitious Constructivist architecture [Constructivism: early 20th-century Russian movement in art and architecture characterized by the creation of nonrepresentational geometric objects using industrial materials] and the hub of a generation of experimental poets and writers. But by the time of Mikhailov’s youth, socialist realism [state-approved Stalinist artistic or literary style in the USSR that depicts an idealized vision of the life and industriousness of the workers] had become the only permitted style, and imagery of the revolution had decayed into Stalinist kitsch.

Mikhailov’s series “Luriki” (1971-85) took found black-and-white photographs of anonymous soldiers and sailors, or of happy families who are all alike, and overpainted them with hand coloring — a common technique in the Soviet Union, where color printing was expensive. These were probably the first artworks in the Soviet Union to use found imagery to capture the Soviet zeitgeist and tweak the regime. Yet their garishness gave him an out with irony-blind censors, to whom he could always explain that he was just trying to make the sitters look prettier.

Frequently his conceptual subversion led him to turn the camera on himself, in performative photography like “Crimean Snobbism” (1982): In sepia-toned prints, we see Boris, Vita and their friends, posing like Italian movie stars at a Black Sea resort town near Yalta. The peninsula is now occupied by Russia, though I also felt another contemporary abrasion; even before perestroika the Mikhailovs and their friends were pouting and flexing like Instagram influencers, playacting as richer and freer than the dominant system allowed. Those desires would recur in his post-Soviet photography, notably the series “Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino” (2000-10), which bitterly skewered the free-market free-for-all of independent Kharkiv, its plastic furniture, its trashy clothes.

Now the war has sent Ukraine into an economic tailspin, and Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid threaten millions with scarcity and worse. Mikhailov never shied from misfortune and crisis, especially in the first years of Ukrainian independence, when the country fell into a spiral of hyperinflation that peaked at 10,000 percent. A new underclass of homeless people appeared in Kharkiv’s city parks, without any state aid to help them.

Out of that misery came the unshrinking “Case History,” for which Mikhailov photographed Kharkiv’s most desperate people and printed them at billboard size. He frequently had them pose nude, laughing or crying in the snow. He posed them in positions that recall a Pietà or the Descent from the Cross. He showed their chapped, burned, infected skin, their tumorous bellies and misshaped genitals; economic history is written on the flesh. Boris and Vita paid these subjects, and often invited them into their home — the 400 or so pictures of “Case History” were not reportage. They were a requiem for all of the failed promises of both communism and capitalism, a danse macabre on the grave of the 20th century.

The “Case History” pictures have compelled, disturbed and enraged viewers for two decades now, with a corpus of academic literature now trailing behind them. They certainly defy Ukraine’s current projection of itself through viral propaganda, though with their indictment of local corruption, the images in “Case History” also call forward to Ukraine’s two revolutions of the 2000s: the Orange Revolution of 2004 and especially the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, which pushed the whole country, Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking alike, into a new democratic era.

Mikhailov and his wife were in Kyiv during the 2014 revolution, and his images of Maidan display an atypical sincerity even as they bristle with the anticipation of war. He returned to hand-coloring for these pictures: yellow outlines of placards, white stripes framing protesters. Black brushstrokes streak above the barricades, and wipe across the neo-Baroque, 200-foot Ukrainian independence monument that lords over the capital’s central plaza.

I’d stood there in Kyiv this past summer, looking up at that kitschy angel, who looked back down onto the square that the invading army planned to parade through and never reached. To see it again, through Mikhailov’s eyes, was to see at last how all of the parts fit together: the trashy and the conceptual, the heroic and the parodic, the busted utopias of the past century and the Ukrainian bravery of 2022.

“Soviet history gave us a common culture, and we had a connection to Moscow, but less and less with time,” Mikhailov told me. “And this is why Maidan happened: because people waited and waited and did not get anything.” He showed me a photo from Kyiv, one more ironic record from a lifetime spent under misrule, and said: “Whatever system there might have been, it was broken, and it brought a lot of grief. But on the other hand, that grief made the country.”

[Jason Farago, critic at large for the New York Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.  In 2022, he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism.  Milana Mazaeva provided translation support for this article.]

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MAISON EUROPÉENNE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE (MEP), PARIS 

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) is a photography exhibition center that opened in 1996.  It’s run by the association Paris Audiovisuel – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, founded in 1978 by Jacques Chirac (1932-2019), then mayor of Paris (1977-95) and financially supported by the City of Paris, which provides the building.  (Chirac was later also Prime Minister of France, 1974-76 and 1986-88, and President of the Republic, 1995-2007.)

The MEP is housed in the Hotel Henault de Cantobre, which was built in 1706 and has belonged to the City of Paris since 1914.  It contains an exhibition center, a 36,000-book library, an auditorium, and a video viewing facility with a wide selection of about 1,000 films.

The MEP is designed to make the three fundamental photographic media (exhibition prints, the printed page, and film) easily accessible to all and offers guided tours, conferences, and film series related to the exhibits.  

The MEP’s collection, dedicated to contemporary work, has more than 20,000 pieces, mainly photographs (film and digital) and videos (artists’ DVDs), as well as a wide range of reference books on photography, including both books by artists and technical or theoretical writings, including many rare editions.  

The facility also has a photographic restoration and conservation workshop (ARCP or, Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des Photographies de la Ville de Paris – Workshop for the Restoration and Conservation of Photographs of the City of Paris).  Since 1983, it’s worked to preserve the photographic heritage of the libraries, archives, and museums of Paris, and it offers its services to other French or foreign institutions as well.

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BIOGRAPHY OF BORIS MIKHAILOV 

Boris Andreyevich Mikhailov (Ukrainian: Борис Андрійович Михайлов; sometimes romanized as Borys Andriyovych Mykhailov) was born on 25 August 1938 in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.  He used to split his time between Kharkiv and Berlin, but as of this year, he’s moved permanently to Berlin.

Mikhailov is considered a classic of modern photography and one of the premier media artists, a master of photomontage.  Mikhailov’s art has a conceptual and socio-documentary character.  His works record changes in everyday life and society that took place at the end of the USSR and after its collapse.

Winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation Award in 2000, awarded in Sweden to “a photographer recognized for major achievements,” his album Unfinished Dissertation (Zürich, 1998) was named one of the top ten best photo albums in the world.  In 2014, he was made an Honorary Academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.

Mikhailov graduated from the Kharkiv Institute of Municipal Construction in 1962.  He began his career and first photographic experiments in Kharkiv.  His works became symbols of social documentary photography.

After graduating from the Kharkiv Institute, Mikhailov was sent to various machine plants around the USSR as an engineer, ending up at a plant back in Kharkiv.  He almost immediately volunteered to make a film about the plant.  

To study the history of the plant, he was sent to the State Film Fund of the USSR, the state archive of films of the Soviet Union, where he got access to documentary films about the children’s labor colony for the homeless.  Studying archival materials, Mikhailov worked with documentary and social photography, which influenced the focus of his photography.  Creating a film about the plant, he actively shot while studying the basics of Soviet official photography.

In the early ’60s, Mikhailov joined the film club at the regional House of Amateur Art of the Trade Unions, where the classes were conducted by Soviet documentary filmmaker and screenwriter Aron Kanevsky (1920–2000), who officially covered the scandalous trial of members of a Kharkiv youth counterculture (stilyagi) called Blue Horse who wanted to explore American and European culture, fashion, and music.  A group of the youths were attacked in the late 1950s and nude photographs taken by members of the group were confiscated, later to be used in their trials.

Conversations with Kanevsky, whose stories about the trial of the stilyagi who sought freedom and became interested in the Beatles, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll (all taboo in the USSR), and were unfairly punished for it, influenced Mikhailov’s perception of life and photography.  

Actively engaged in photography and obtaining the kind of results that gave him confidence, in the mid-’60s, Mikhailov moved from a film to still photography.  He had his first exhibition at the end of the 1960s.   In 1969, however, the KGB found nude images of his wife in the photo laboratory, he was dismissed from the plant.  He gave up engineering and took up photography full time.

Following on his learning about the Blue Horse incident, personal experience of injustice and problems with the KGB, along with reports of Stalin’s repressions and internment camps, give Mikhailov a different understanding of the Soviet Union and its duality.  He gained an understanding of the possibility of criminal behavior of the Soviet authorities and this informed his critical thinking in ways that affected his photography.

From 1968 to 1975 he shot several series documenting everyday scenes depicting life in the USSR.  Within these pictures, the photographer secreted critical comments of the existing Soviet political circumstances.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mikhailov traveled and formed relationships with photography artists in places like Lithuania and Moscow.  He was becoming well known and respected in Eastern Europe.  With the beginning of perestroika, the program of reconstruction of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1985-91; President of the Soviet Union: 1990-91), he became a prominent member of the Soviet unofficial photography movement.

By the 1990s, the Ukrainian artist was being shown worldwide and in 2004, he took up residence part time in Berlin.  In 2022, he moved there full time.  He has received many international awards and honors, and he’s worked as a visiting professor at many prestigious schools and universities: the Department of Visual Environmental Research at Harvard University (2000) and the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts (2002-03); in 2008, he was elected Academician of the German Academy of Arts in Berlin.