Boris Mikhailov: Tea Coffee Capuccino

For the acclaimed photographer Boris Mikhailov (born 1938), a society's most significant paradigm shifts are often most clearly perceived in the smallest of everyday transactions. For example, in a café or restaurant in Soviet-era Ukraine, a waiter would have offered you "tea or coffee?" Today, two decades after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the ascent of western capitalism, it's "tea, coffee, cappuccino?" In his latest body of work, Mikhailov addresses this shift by focusing on his hometown of Charkow, in northeast Ukraine. Here, the consumerist invasion of western capitalism is everywhere apparent in huge, colourful advertising banners and billboards, but the promises of the so-called Orange Revolution seem to have been fulfilled for only a few.

Mikhailov writes that "only when one sees misery in a picture, does one begin to notice it in the street," and throughout the 200-plus photographs in this volume, he takes pains to neither dramatize nor ameliorate the conditions of life in Charkow; and so his tough-minded pictures present a bleak but rigorously honest portrait of Ukraine and its inhabitants.

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For Boris Mikhailov, societal changes are most clearly visible in small, everyday events. While the waiter in Ukraine would still be asking "tea or coffee?" during the Soviet era, the question today is "tea, coffee, cappuccino?"

In his newest works (2000 - 2010), Mikhailov tackles precisely these changes and captures-as he has already in "By the Ground / At Dusk" (Oktagon, 1996)-daily life in his hometown Charkow. In this collection of more than 200 colour photographs, the West is perceptible everywhere in the form of huge, colourful advertising banners, but the promises of the Orange Revolution, that everything would get better, have only been fulfilled for few.

Through palliating nothing, transfiguring nothing, Mikhailov attempts to sensitise the view of the observer. The individual pictures and scenes create a large tableau of society that tells us more about Ukraine and its inhabitants than any specialised book.