Boris Mikhailov

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004 originally published 1999, p.357

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 spelled disaster for many citizens of Mikhailov's native Kharkov, in Ukraine. As the state apparatus collapsed, bleak predictability rapidly gave way to chaos and want. The photographer, whose earlier work includes sympathetic records of communal pastimes, responded with a bitter series that starkly evokes the squalor of desperation, drink, and despair. In the same years, but in another photographic mode altogether, he experimented with flagrantly staged political and sexual satires.

A decade later, as a few made millions, the least fortunate Ukrainians were more desperate still. This untitled work belongs to Mikhailov's bold and risky series Case History, for which he paid Kharkov's outcasts to pose and perform. The best of his new photographs improbably blend the opposing poles of his art. No-nonsense realism and impromptu playacting seamlessly conspire in a persuasive theater of wrenching misery.