The special thing about Boris Mikhailov as a "book maker" is that he thinks of and develops photography in sequences, in spaces and cuts, in the forms of its montage.

Viewed as a whole, his books and book drafts which often only exist as one original copy create a retrospective of a very unique and intimate kind. The artist's books "Krymskaja Fotomanija" (Crimean Photomania) and "Mountains", each with 128 pages, are shown here in facsimile, accompanied by 80 pages of illustrated text.

Boris Mikhailov is seen as a chronicler of his Ukrainian homeland: the everyday life of the so-called little people on the street, on the beach, at dances anywhere that the politic becomes visible in the private. Drawing on this material, Mikhailov explores both the human condition and the history and decline of the Soviet Union and the consequences of its fall.

About the Author:

Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1938. He uses documentary as well as staging and studio techniques to comment on the Soviet Regime and, latterly, the downfall of the Soviet Union. His work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Kunsthalle (Zurich), and the Sprengel Museum (Hannover). Today, Mikhailov lives and works in both Kharkov and Berlin.

This past year Boris Mikhailov joined the ranks of William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Frank as the recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, confirming the international stature and critical acclaim he has earned in the last few years with one-person exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, London's Photographer's Gallery, and the DAAD Gallery in Berlin as well as representation in major international surveys such as the Carnegie International.
 
His first book, "Unfinished Dissertation", was published by Scalo in 1997, on the occasion of his receipt of the Albert Renger-Patzsch Prize; in 2000, he published his second book with Scalo, "Case History", and was awarded the photo book award of the International Festival for Photography in Arles, France. Mikhailov also recently accepted an invitation to teach at Harvard University beginning in the fall of 2000.
 
This new book contains a never-before-published series of work from the early 1980s: Mikhailov photographed ''The Dancers'' in his hometown in Ukraine during a period when the former Soviet Union was a reality, before the appearance of Gorbachov and "perestroika". We observe the open-air dancing scene with great astonishment; seeing older and younger people enjoy themselves in a way that might be contradictory to the images we might have about everyday life in the old Soviet Union. These cheerful images remind us how little women and men need to have a good time.
 
An essay by Russian art critic Boris Groys and an exhaustive interview make this volume a must-have for readers and libraries interested in contemporary art and photography. Hardcover, 144 pages, 9 x 10 inches, 65 duotone illustrations.

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.

Rarely has anyone photographed reality in such an unprettified way as Boris Mikhailov. He captures the unadorned and the natural; in pictures devoid of aesthetic exhaltation, he concentrates on people and their living conditions.

On his journeys through Russia, Germany and his Ukrainian homeland, Mikhailov has equally observed the poor, the well-to-do, the outcasts and the homeless. Look at Me, I Look at Water was composed in 1999 at the suggestion of the Heiner Mller-Society when Boris Mikhailov's name was found in one of Heiner Mller's notebooks.

With this book Mikhailov is continuing, thematically and conceptionally, what he began with his artist's book Unfinished Dissertation in 1985.

The photographs are accompanied by handwritten Russian commentaries, which together give the impression of a private album which narrates stories from a chapter in the artist's life.

The Former Soviet Union’s Foremost Photographer

Since starting out as a photographer in the mid-1960s, Boris Mikhailov (b. Kharkov, Ukraine, 1938; lives and works in Kharkov and Berlin) has built a wide-ranging and strikingly multifaceted oeuvre. A virtuoso of his art, he has explored a great variety of ways of using the medium to paint a picture of his immediate surroundings that is as unsparing as it is ironic. His unflagging critical engagement of photographic techniques and the work with different cameras and stylistic devices as well as the alternation in his oeuvre between conceptual photography and documentary approaches render him the preeminent present-day photographer whose work reaches back to the Soviet era.

The book - which accompanies his largest exhibition in Germany to date - brings together a selection of works that includes the experimental pictures of his early years as well as his most recent photographs created in Berlin.
With essays by Thomas Köhler, Christina Landbrecht, Inka Schube and Jan Verwoert.