Albert Mobilio
Blue is the color of the blockade, hunger, and war: eerie portraits of everyday street life in late twentieth-century Ukraine.
Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times, Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway, New York City, through February 22, 2025
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As its title—Refracted Times—indicates, Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov’s current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery offers a historical narrative, one recording three chronological points during his country’s troubled passage from Soviet domination to independence. A series of C-prints titled Salt Lake, taken in 1986, shows vacationers at a factory-adjacent beach in southern Ukraine; By the Ground, a sequence shot in 1991—the year the Soviet Union collapsed—presents signs of urban dissolution; and, finally, At Dusk, a group of blue-tinted photos from 1993, extends that meditation on social disarray. The uniformly gritty content doesn’t make for an optimistic before-and-after tale; while those bathers may be clustered around a drainage pipe in the shadow of smokestacks, they are at least on holiday.
Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon. Pictured: Yesterday’s Sandwich, late 1960s–’70s.
Mikhailov began his career as an engineer but turned to photography in the late 1960s. Associated with the Sots Art movement (the Russian version of Pop Art), he employed various darkroom interventions: hand-coloring, superimpositions, and the use of found images. Evidence of this period can be found in one of the show’s videos, Yesterday’s Sandwich (late 1960s–’70s), a fluid collage of photos altered to create Surrealist juxtapositions. As this wasn’t the sort of thing sanctioned by official culture, Mikhailov operated at its margins, sometimes reported by his street photography subjects to the police, who then ordered him to open his camera and expose the film. By the early 1990s, though, with Soviet downfall imminent, his first exhibitions abroad took place.
Boris Mikhailov, Salt Lake, 1986. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
Within the context of Western European art, Mikhailov’s experimental work was hardly shocking, echoing as it did decades-old compositions by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, and Hans Bellmer. Still, the Soviet censors, ever alert to formal innovation’s subversive properties, understandably took note. Yet the documentary-style photographs on display at Marian Goodman would have been far more prejudicial to the regime. The bathers featured in Salt Lake sit on a rocky dirt embankment sloping abruptly into water that looks unappetizingly murky, given the harsh contrast of the black-and-white film. Seemingly unconcerned with an open concrete duct likely leading from the nearby factory, the swimmers (well, more accurately, waders) stand about under a cloudy sky and converse. The pictures, taken the same year as the Chernobyl meltdown, don’t evoke a socialist paradise so much as another ongoing environmental disaster. Mikhailov subtly presents this Soviet-era paradox—amid awfulness, Ukrainians find what pleasure there is to be had.
Boris Mikhailov, By the Ground, 1991. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
For the images gathered under the title By the Ground (the phrase, Mikhailov reports, was inspired by Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths), the photographer employed a horizon camera to produce panoramic views of street scenes. Shooting from hip height, he would capture awkward, unstudied moments: babushkas wearing heavy coats stoop over shopping bags, children play around a rubble-strewn basement entrance. The use of sepia toning lends the pedestrians a palpable weariness, as if their passage over cracked pavements and crumbling facades could only be described as trudging. But that overdetermined reading is countered by more perplexing acts: a young woman (seen from behind, as are many of Mikhailov’s people) peers over a ramshackle fence; what she seeks is unknown, but her tensed leg perched on a rock reveals an acute need to see something. Her youth, her effort, even her anonymity suggest a vitality and possibility that are otherwise drained by the series’ portrayal of so drab a domain.
Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
The more than two dozen prints comprising At Dusk somehow chill the room in which they are hung. Produced just two years after By the Ground, in this series, Ukraine’s declining fortunes remain fully in evidence, but Mikhailov has accentuated his depictions of decay and human distress by hand-coloring the photos in cobalt blue. This choice is an attempt to conjure the night sky of his youth in Kharkhiv during the Second World War. “Blue,” he explains in the gallery text, “is the color of the blockade, hunger, and war.” In addition to the tinting, some of the photos have been stained and scored, giving them the appearance of relics from a catastrophe. Again, the frame is panoramic, shot from waist level; again, figures are seen from behind, often only the lower half of their bodies. Mikhailov places viewers in the midst of a city’s street life; its mundane chores, random debris, and incipient chaos swirl around us.
Boris Mikhailov, At Dusk, 1993. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
At what might be a public dump, a shabbily dressed woman lugs two buckets as she moves past several garbage bins; above her, large birds caught mid-flight look ominous, even predatory. Around an outdoor concrete table, several men stand, hands in the pockets of their bulky coats. On a street corner, a man stumbles to the ground while passersby rush along. The subjects that occupy this bleak and wintry locale are isolated, lonely, and, when a face is visible, it’s often grim, staring out from within a closely wrapped headscarf or fur-lined hat. When people do interact, the scene is fraught: a couple, blurred and indistinct, clutch one another in an open plaza. Mikhailov has applied smudges all around them so they look as though they were huddling against a storm of dark scars. In a rare composition, another embracing couple direct their gaze at the camera: the young man allows us neutral regard, while his female companion broaches a smile. Whatever optimism might spring from their apparent contentment is blunted by their surroundings (they share the frame with a man walking past, the blankness of his dark silhouette a kind of refusal—if not a rebuke—to their intimacy) and the photographer’s handiwork (the overcast sky has been mottled with haphazard splotches and streaks). They may have one another, but they are fated to be subsumed within the encompassing disintegration.
Boris Mikhailov, At Dusk, 1993. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
It’s useful to keep in mind that the exhibition’s photos all date from decades prior to the first Russian incursion into Ukraine in 2014, let alone the full-scale invasion in 2022. However dire, this Dantean portrait of the country doesn’t include the social and infrastructural toll of years of war. Nothing, we can assume, has grown more lovely. But long before armed conflict, the Soviet era’s grinding ruination left a blasted landscape and demoralized citizenry. Not satisfied to merely document the wreckage, Mikhailov lavishes it with compositional and darkroom attention to discover its strange and disquieting allures. In this fallen world, it is forever dusk.
Albert Mobilio is the author of four books of poetry: Same Faces (2020), Touch Wood (2011), Me with Animal Towering (2002), and The Geographics (1995). A book of fiction, Games and Stunts, appeared in 2016.