Images of Ukraine, When Things Began to Fall Apart

New York Times

13-02-2025

When future historians seek to understand life in the twilight years and aftermath of the Soviet Union, from the late 1960s to the close of the 20th century, they will study the photographs of Boris Mikhailov.
An artist who had to work surreptitiously in his youth, Mikhailov since the collapse of the Soviet regime has enjoyed worldwide acclaim, including exhibitions of his pictures at the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern. Like Nikolai Gogol, another Russian-speaking Ukrainian, Mikhailov depicts hardship and pretense with a guffaw. 'Isn't it awful?' elides seamlessly into 'Isn't it funny?' — all of it tinged with a melancholy awareness that the joke may be on him.
Mikhailov has homes in his native Kharkiv and in Berlin, although he has not been to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Vigorous at 86, he included a new video composed of still photographs along with a sampling from some of his best-known photo series, in 'Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times,' at Marian Goodman Gallery through Feb. 22. He likes to explore a subject thoroughly by presenting a sequence of images, frequently juxtaposed in pairs to highlight recurring themes and revealing incongruities.
Mikhailov could not exhibit his work publicly until 1990, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolution. He initially built a reputation in Kharkiv by superimposing photographic slides and projecting them in private apartments. Once he was no longer confined by state censors, he printed the images as montages that he called 'Yesterday's Sandwich.'
In the exhibition at Marian Goodman, a video reproduces the original projections, with one image quickly succeeded by the next, to the accompaniment of a Pink Floyd soundtrack. Very often, he placed a shot of a nude woman (forbidden under Soviet morality standards) on top of a drab street scene or an idealized landscape, infusing the dreary reality or banal fantasy of Soviet life with a suppressed eroticism.
The bathers in 'Salt Lake,' a series he made in 1986, are scantily dressed, but they tend to be elderly and bulky, occasionally in the company of a throng of children. They have flocked to this polluted lake in eastern Ukraine because the warm salty discharge from the soda factories on its shores was thought to be salubrious. Picnicking by railroad tracks or swimming alongside effluent pipes, they are either stalwart or delusional.
Displayed on a table near the large prints is a unique leporello, or accordion-pleated maquette, that Mikhailov made for the series by assembling black-and-white photos in foldout book form. He then toned the prints in sepia, summoning ironic associations with the grand European spas of an earlier time at Vichy and Baden-Baden. In some, the compositions are dominated by large figures and recall the photographs of families by the Seine made by a French artist Mikhailov cites as an influence, Henri Cartier-Bresson. But what was lyrical in France has become farcical in the Soviet Union.
With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the economy foundered, social supports vanished, and things went from bad to horrific. The exhibition doesn't include 'Case History,' a controversial series that Mikhailov, assisted by his wife, Vita, made in 1997 and 1998 by paying indigent people in Kharkiv to pose for his camera, sometimes having them strip in the freezing weather and display their sagging flesh, injuries and deformities.
Less confrontational and more elegiac, 'By the Ground' (1991), sepia-colored like 'Salt Lake,' comprises paired photographs that Mikhailov shot with a panoramic camera he held at hip level. As he took these pictures of homeless people struggling with bundles and pushing their remaining possessions in wheelbarrows, Mikhailov was thinking of the American photographers who had portrayed migrants and the unemployed in the Great Depression. He installs these prints low, so that viewers must cast their eyes downward to pay attention to the people sloughed off as dregs by the churn of history.
In one pair of photographs, a boy turned toward a friend is oblivious of the old woman sleeping beside him on their shared bench. In the companion photo, a pedestrian walks past a filthy man sleeping in a contorted pose on a narrow stone curb, while in front of him, truck-born carts carry rags that, like the sprawled vagrant, are discards. Beautifully composed and lit, the 'By the Ground' photographs constitute a somber memorial to those left behind by social revolution.
Instead of sepia, Mikhailov used blue to color the prints in 'At Dusk,' which he made in 1993, also with a panoramic camera. Although the images resemble cyanotypes, for Mikhailov the color conjures the bombing he experienced as a child in Kharkiv at twilight during World War II.
The pictures are grainy, and the prints are distressed with smears and scratches. They look as battered and weary as their subjects, who are trudging, stumbling and scavenging. In some, there are no telltale details to indicate that these are images made recently and not during Mikhailov's childhood. The suffering and endurance are timeless.
In an eight-minute silent video, 'Our Time Is Our Burden' (2024), the recent piece in the exhibition, Mikhailov displays paired photos that he shot in Berlin, where the waste is the sort generated by overabundance. (The video also includes an appropriated photo, of a crow a dove released in St Peter's Square in Rome in 2014, as Pope Francis called for peace in Ukraine after anti-government protesters had been killed in Kyiv.) In one juxtaposition, old shoes and plates are displayed on blankets at a flea market, and the facing image depicts a pile of empty bottles on the street, near people congregating at a gay bar.
Now that Mikhailov is out of Kharkiv, he can no longer chronicle its inhabitants, who have suffered tremendously from Russian aggression. Without his longtime subject, the art is deracinated. Even when he takes up his old themes in Berlin — there is a homeless man paired with a fellow in a clown suit in 'Our Time Is Our Burden' — the impact is far less powerful.
Because of his fondness for montage, he is sometimes compared to Aleksandr Rodchenko, the great Russian Constructivist. But Mikhailov's images, although beautiful, are less about formalist ingenuity. Instead, they vividly evoke a panoply of desperate struggles and dearly won joys, at a particular time in a specific place.