Case History: Boris Mikhailov’s Street Photography

Berlin-based Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov photographs dispossessed Ukrainian citizens against the backdrop of a desperate post-Soviet economy. Mikhailov is a street photographer. His subjects are the homeless that wander cruel winter streets in search of warmth, company, shelter, and vodka. Kids on glue piss in the snow for Mikhailov’s camera. An aging toothless couple bend over for our benefit, pointing their emaciated naked buttocks towards the camera. In fact, most of these bodies are naked as Mikhailov requests this of his paid subjects.
In many ways the complexities of Mikhailov’s project problematises easy moral categorisation of this work. Certainly the artist believes in the necessary exposure of such miserable living conditions to the West as he has frequently pronounced in interviews and public presentations. But there are also idiosyncrasies that confuse the legacies of notorious photographic documentary precedents. Why the essential drive to undress his subject for example? The performative features throughout this work as people clown around with each other, acting up for the camera. There is something unmistakably carnivalesque in these images, recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of the grotesque in his essay Rabelais and His World (1965).                This paper focuses on Boris Mikhailov’s book Case History published in 1999. I position this significant body of work as the result of a documentary mode flirting with an abject variety of fashion photography operating at levels of Bakhtin’s reading of grotesque realism. My interpretation of Mikhailov’s work is used to reconsider ethical codes identified by Martha Rosler and other critics twenty years ago, while further engaging recent appraisals of a photographic documentary tradition.

Gavin Hipkins is a Wellington-based artist and writer. Recent exhibitions include Tell Me a Story: Narrative Photography Now at San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts (2007) and Picturing Eden at the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York (2006). He teaches in the School of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington.