From Whisper to Shout

Two men in dark coats and fedoras stand on the sidewalk, their backs to the camera. The taller man, on the left, has the posture of someone who wants to keep moving. But the shorter man grasps his companion’s arm, as if taking him aside to whisper something. Next to him is a gigantic ear, like an angel’s wing emanating from his back. 

This image is one frame of Boris Mikhailov’s slideshow Yesterday’s Sandwich, made in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1960s and 1970s and projected to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York as part of “Refracted Times,” a show of Mikhailov’s work. The superimposed, often psychedelic images—a giant mantis stalking a mountainous landscape; fried eggs over a pair of broken crucifixes; a nude woman bursting through the ropes of a hammock into verdant nature—are a broadcast from a society of compound vision, where what you saw was often different than what you were meant to see, and the eyes and ears of the state were always looming. “This was a period of hidden meanings and coded messages in all genres,” Mikhailov wrote in 2022.¹ Superimposition and montage, pioneered by Soviet avant-gardists in the 1920s and 1930s, aestheticized the dynamism of a state just born from revolution. Half a century later Mikhailov repurposed those methods to thumb his nose at the decrepitude and deceit of a sclerotic regime. 

Mikhailov himself is a man of compound identity. He was born in Kharkiv to a Ukrainian father and a Jewish mother in 1938, in the aftermath of the Holodomor, the famine that Stalin engineered to turn Ukraine into an “exemplary Soviet republic” and subdue its peasants for their resistance to, among other things, the collectivization of agriculture. One in eight Ukrainians—more than four million people—died of hunger between 1932 and 1934 in what many today consider a genocide. Raised amid the rubble of World War II, Mikhailov followed his parents into engineering, and in 1965 he began making photographs on the sly in the darkroom of the factory where he worked. In 1968 KGB agents found his nude photographs of his wife, Vita, which they confiscated as pornography. (Artists in the Soviet Union were, with some exceptions, barred from depicting nudity until 1986.)   

After this official sanction, which cost him his job, Mikhailov devoted himself entirely to photography. He didn’t call himself an artist—he made his living as a technical photographer—but in 1971 he and seven other likeminded photographers established an underground collective called Vremya (“Time”), which later evolved into the Kharkiv School. With their nudes, absurd montages, surreal symbolism, and coded coloration, they sought to undermine the canons of socialist realism. They shared their experimental images privately in kitchens and living rooms. In 1983, when Vremya hosted a public exhibition, it was shut down on the first day. 

Mikhailov’s primary subject was the shabby mundanity that was everywhere visible in the USSR but seldom seen in state-sanctioned art or iconography. He experimented with street photography and with hasty, intentionally “bad” or “trash” photographs that he hoped would reflect what the Soviet world actually looked like. Color became a tool for defamiliarization. In the series “Red” (1968–1975), he captured the official hue on everything from trams to acne-ridden faces. He tinted found images and staged scenes: posters of Lenin and Brezhnev with lips painted the same Tootsie Pop red as officials’ sashes at a parade; young boys in gas masks standing in front of a magenta wall. The color play, he wrote, was “a way to compromise and undermine the images from television and movie screens, from everywhere, which were putting pressure on us, bearing down on us.” As if allergic to the authority of the single narrative, Mikhailov almost always worked in sequences, showing the same subject from an unruly variety of angles.

Boris Mikhailov/Marian Goodman Gallery

Boris Mikhailov: Salt Lake, 1986

Boris Mikhailov/Marian Goodman Gallery

Boris Mikhailov: Salt Lake, 1986

Boris Mikhailov/Marian Goodman Gallery

Boris Mikhailov: Salt Lake, 1986

In the 1980s, when the Soviet economy was in terminal decline and, in Mikhailov’s recollection, life was stuck in “a frozen day-to-dayness,” he shifted into a more humanistic register. The series “Salt Lake” (1986), the earliest on display in “Refracted Times,” brings us along for a beach day at a lake in southern Ukraine whose warm, salty waters were reputed to have curative effects. Yet the fifty-plus images in the series (most displayed on an accordion-like leporello, two per page) show Brueghelian scenes that suggest anything but health; their sepia tone makes them seem much older than they are. Fleshy, aging bodies loll in the shadow of a nearby factory. An old lady lounges on an industrial drainage pipe that empties into the water. Two substantial women chat onshore, one with a garish beehive and a pearl necklace and earrings, the other in a gaudy checkered bikini. Train tracks run to nowhere.

During the chaotic collapse of the USSR, Mikhailov was struck by the number of newly jobless or homeless people who appeared on the streets of Kharkiv. They became the subject of “By the Ground” (1991). (The title alludes to Maxim Gorky’s 1902 play The Lower Depths.) He shot these narrow rectangular photographs from the hip with a Horizon panoramic camera, which has a 120-degree field of view that produces a slight fish-eye distortion and a sense of distance even in tightly framed shots. People lie, doze, wait, plod, play. Men sit on stoops, idle or drunk; people cue (lines look longer in panoramas), stand outside closed gates, or peek over fences, blocked from wherever they want to go. Everyone seems to be alone.

The photographs are presented in groups of two, unframed, and mounted uncomfortably low, so that the viewer must stoop to approximate the perspective of a child or, Mikhailov suggests, “a hunched, old person.” The two perspectives, perhaps, aren’t so different: an image of an old man limping with his cane along a desolate street, past a bakery with cartoonish signs showing a loaf of bread and a head of wheat, is mounted next to one in which two girls stand astride a hole that must be a staircase but that looks awfully like a grave. Another girl looks on, with a hair covering that makes her seem prematurely old. The tone—a dirty sepia, almost as if the photos have been soiled with grit from the street—suggests that this Kharkiv is closer to the 1920s than to the 2000s.

The cobalt blue panoramas of “At Dusk” (1993), by contrast, recall a more specific past: the nighttime bombing that preceded the German invasion of Kharkiv in October 1941. That year Mikhailov and his mother fled, escaping the Nazi murder of tens of thousands of Kharkiv’s Jews at the Drobytsky Yar ravine. (Mikhailov and his mother returned to the city in 1943.) Many of the large pictures in this series are off-balance, blurry with movement, giving the viewer the sense of being rushed somewhere; the city is bleak and rubble-filled, and the prints themselves are mottled with brushy gestures, as if painted. Most of the figures are seen from behind, standing alone in thick overcoats, but in two images couples embrace against the cold blue. 

“By the Ground” and “At Dusk” were supposed to form a trilogy with a third series, which would have been tinted an optimistic pink. But when Mikhailov returned to Ukraine in 1997 after a year in Berlin, he was confronted with a new ruling class of millionaires and a new underclass of bomzhes, or homeless people, left desperate by hyperinflation, which had peaked at 10,000 percent. Instead of shooting them surreptitiously, he began getting to know the bomzhes by inviting them for meals and even paying them to bare their often sagging, disfigured, or malnourished bodies for the controversial portraits in “Case History” (1998).  

Along with Vita, his frequent model and collaborator, in the late 1990s Mikhailov began living between Kharkiv and Berlin, in part, he said, to “learn about the West.” He was already established there: his work was first exhibited in the US in 1991, and “By the Ground” was shown at MoMA two years later. Many accolades, teaching positions, and shows followed, culminating in a retrospective at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris in 2022. But Ukraine, which he represented at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2017, has remained Mikhailov’s creative center of gravity. He has continued at irregular intervals to stalk Kharkiv’s streets, documenting its changing face amid westernization. In 2013 he made tense, energetic pictures of the Maidan protests in Kyiv.

Though he has borne witness to nearly all of modern Ukrainian history, Mikhailov has only been able to observe the current war from a distance. In February 2022, prevented from returning to Ukraine due to the pandemic, he could only watch as Vladimir Putin’s forces assaulted Kharkiv, which is roughly twenty-five miles from the Russian border. The Mikhailovs’ neighborhood was bombed. Their son joined them in Berlin, as did Vita’s daughter and granddaughter.

It makes sense, then, that in the most recent piece in “Refracted Times,” a silent slideshow called Our Time is Our Burden (2024), the war feels far away. This is more scrapbook than samizdat. Trading his characteristic irony for frankness, Mikhailov presents two images at a time. Some—of grandchildren, friends, the family cat—make you smile. In one slide a box of squiggly Japanese eggplants rhymes with a wall of graffiti. But there are also familiar shots of cast-off people and objects. Darkness flickers in the glimpses of creepy dolls and mannequins, grim concrete buildings, a tornado—and in an upskirt photo of an ice skater next to a news clip of fighter jets in formation above an apartment block. 

Later the pictures become more explicit—but they remain pictures, or pictures of pictures, in the case of snapshots of TikTok and other social media. At one point the screen is monopolized by a 2014 news photograph of a crow attacking a white dove released by Pope Francis after a prayer for peace. A crop of miniature Ukrainian flags sprouts from a graveyard, while Mikhailov covers his eyes with a blood-red napkin. Troops crawl through a trench, while Mikhailov lies on the grass in front of a monument, half-sunbather, half-corpse. Whereas the superimpositions of Yesterday’s Sandwich and the off-kilter, out-of-time aesthetic of “By the Ground” and “At Dusk” puncture official illusions, the diptychs of Our Time is Our Burden convey a sense of powerlessness, even resignation. (Mikhailov is eighty-six.) There are no longer any games to be played, no heroes to undress. It’s all there for us to see.