Born in 1938, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Boris Mikhaïlov remained a guarded photographer during the Soviet Union, whose films were regularly confiscated. Today, his abundant work is present in the greatest international museums. The European House of Photography (MEP) in Paris is currently showing the largest retrospective ever organized, entitled “Boris Mikhaïlov – Ukrainian newspaper”.
Unpredictable, unclassifiable, insolent, unwavering… Boris Mikhaïlov is a kind of Charles Bukowski of photography. With him, the ugliness of reality is at the service of the beauty of truth, and the diversion of ambient ideology reinforces the poetry of his images. Today, his photographs have entered the most prestigious collections, from the Tate Modern in London, to the MoMA in New York, via the Pinchuk Art Center in kyiv. At the age of 84, the photographer returns to the MEP over a 60-year career where he practiced the subversion of the Soviet system through his exceptional gaze on the individual in his country of birth, Ukraine. Faced with the machine guns of propaganda, first communist then capitalist, he fought back with his unparalleled avant-garde visual language. Interview on his work with Simon Baker, former director of the Photography department at the Tate in London and since 2018 director of the European House of Photography, who participated in the preparation of this exceptional exhibition of 20 series and almost 800 images.
RFI : How Boris Mikhailov became a photographer ?
simon baker : Originally, he was an engineer. He had been lent a camera to document the factory in which he worked. Very soon he started taking pictures of other subjects, for example of his naked wife… This put him in danger with the Soviet authorities [et il a été renvoyé de son poste par le KGB, NDLR]. He was also very admiring of a group of young photographers who were persecuted for taking pictures on the beach in bathing suits. Unofficial images, from reality, from real life in the Soviet Union.
His art often consists of quirky, transgressive photos. During the time of the Soviet Union, where he was able to exhibit these works and how did he earn a living as a photographer ?
At the start, he did something quite commercial: he took photos of people, photos of weddings, newborns, or loved ones who disappeared at the front, and recolored these portraits and photographs. For a while he made a living out of it. Very quickly, he started to play with that, with somewhat bright colors, somewhat bizarre images… And he began to take his own photos. At the time, there were “dissident kitchens”, that is to say dissident artists exhibited in their apartments. For example, he was close to Ilya Kabakov and they kept in touch [après l’exile de Kabakov en 1987, NDLR]. There was a sort of subculture of artists, even during the Soviet Union, which tried to show a vision and practices that were very divergent from the official, even propagandist, vision of the state.
There is the series Red (red), from 1965-1978, but later also photographs immersed in shades of cobalt blue or a monumental triptych dominated by the color green showing a woman in front of an abandoned factory. Mikhailov visibly linked the color red to Soviet ideology. Do the other colors also represent a certain ideology in his work? ?
Series Red depicts photographs of everyday life and highlights red details or objects. It can be a flag, a sweater or something else. For Mikhailov at the time, this signals the grip of communist ideology in every aspect of life in Ukrainian society. He has always hand colored his photos, but with the other colored series he has gone much further. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he made a blue series in 1993, titled At Dusk (” At dusk “). He showed a kind of war memory there, because his country was in a really very difficult state. For him, it was a reminder of his memories of the war as a child: of being scared at night. For him, blue gives the idea of the end of something, war, fear… For him, Ukraine has always had episodes of crisis and fragility during which society was in danger.
During the Soviet Union, he made visible the gap between official propaganda and reality, for example by showing poverty. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, he showed – with series like Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino (2000-2010) – that poverty continued to exist, even if it took on another face. Before the fall of the wall, he considered himself an unofficial, subversive photographer. How does he define his role since the end of the Soviet Union ?
After the fall of the Soviet Union, he made a sort of counter-vision. We in the West have seen the images of ex-Soviet countries, with the appearance of Coca Cola, McDonald’s, etc. It felt like openness made life easier and liberated for people in former Soviet countries, with life becoming much more Western and European. Boris Mikhailov showed that the end of this ideology was accompanied by the disappearance of a society and of security for people. For example, he did a series on homeless people. In this series, he showed previously invisible people, no one ever talked about them or took care of them. And Mikhaïlov just wanted to show that it was everywhere a reality. But it has not been in the vision of displayed values like the perestroika or the glasnost that we have seen from afar.
In 2013, he made a series, The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out. It documents the Maidan revolt. Has he thought of doing a third part on this theater of warwith the invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine in 2022 ?
Since the Covid pandemic, Boris has not been to Ukraine anymore. He is fragile, he cannot move. The most recent trip to Ukraine was in 2019, but, of course, he wants to go there, if there is a possibility. Like all Ukrainians, he lived through this war. His family fled to Berlin. Every day, they experience the effects of war, even if it is indirectly.
He is self-taught. What were his artistic influences when he started with photography ?
With Boris Mikhaïlov, we can clearly see the commercial side, when he recolors his photos. It is really a popular photography in which he assumed the techniques of craftsmanship, with family portraits, the daily events of people. Afterwards, he created while being in contact with avant-garde artists. He used black and white photography also as a diary. This comes from art history, but also from literary history. Literature is very important to him, his references are often literary, historical and avant-garde literature, poetry… He talks a lot about poets. He is very involved with street photography, street photography. He has influences, but he is above all self-taught. He invented his own ways of doing things. There’s a real mix of influences that come from many different angles.
He never mentioned names like William Klein or Sergei Eisenstein ?
He lived in the Soviet Union, so he has all this heritage from Rodchenko (1891-1956) or from the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. But later Mikhailov was not only in contact with photographers, but especially with dissident artists like Kabakov, for example. Today, there are photographers with whom Boris Mikhaïlov is close, like the American Nan Goldin, the Japanese Nobuyoshi Araki or other photographers known to have done very transgressive things. On the other hand, at the time, I don’t believe that Mikhaïlov had these avant-garde references, his work really consisted of a diversion from everyday photography through self-taught and unofficial work.
► Boris Mikhailov – Ukrainian newspaperexhibition at the European House of Photography, from September 7, 2022 to January 15, 2023.
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