![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/From-the-series-Yesterdays-Sandwich-1960s-1970s-\u00a9-Boris-Mikhailov-VG-Bild-Kunst-Bonn-Courtesy-Boris-.jpeg\")
From the series \u201cYesterday\u2019s Sandwich\u201d, 1960s-1970s \u00a9 Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov<\/p>\nFlags and banners, a tractor, a soldier with a pink rose, a cracked scarlet table with plastic flowers and green jugs, a man with a string bag at a red bus stop. The series Red from this retrospective of Boris Mikhailov\u2019s photography includes unofficial glimpses of official parades and propaganda, where the colour is ubiquitous. In one photo from a nearby series, a woman in a fur hat and white coat sells cakes in the snow below a statue of Lenin. In the everyday details of daily life and ordinary people, Mikhailov feels a bit like a Soviet Martin Parr, but his later work explores darker and more experimental avenues.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian Diary spans more than half a century of photography by the self-taught artist. Two floors of the Photographer\u2019s Gallery are roughly divided by the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the top floor, defiantly unconventional pictures critique the ideological straightjacket of communist rule. The floor below displays photos from the decades that followed, including images of burning barricades from the pre-war protests in 2014.<\/p>\n
Soviet propaganda often featured idealised physical forms and landscapes. Men and women, glowing with health and happiness, could be seen at work and play. Mikhailov\u2019s photographs form parodies or direct antitheses to this aesthetic of perfection. His imagery is only accidentally beautiful, focusing instead, with care and intention, on the mundane, the discarded, decrepit and indecent, the crude, the sad and the ugly. Images are sometimes hand-coloured with deliberate artificiality, layered, blurred, doctored or purposefully poorly-framed.<\/p>\n
Dozens of different projects are on display here. Born in 1938 in the industrial city of Kharkiv, Mikhailov became a photographer in the 1960s, inspired by the \u201cBlue Horse\u201d group of 1950s students whose joyful beach photos were condemned as debauchery. Given a camera to record the glorious daily life of the factory he worked in, he was sacked after using it to take naked portraits of his wife. The KGB found his photos, and he narrowly escaped prison.<\/p>\n
From the series \u201cYesterday\u2019s Sandwich\u201d, 1960s-1970s \u00a9 Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov<\/p>\n
One of his earliest projects, Yesterday\u2019s Sandwich, starting in the late sixties, came about by chance and is shown here as a huge and mesmerising slideshow. \u201cOne day I threw a bunch of slides on a bed and two of them stuck together,\u201d says Mikhailov in one of the show\u2019s many direct quotations from the artist. \u201cFascinated by the resulting image, I started superimposing one slide on top of another and placing them in a frame, putting them together like a sandwich.\u201d The results are strange, ghostly compositions: a fried egg floats above an ocean, a man jumps past a seemingly huge frog, a woman\u2019s body echoes a mountain.<\/p>\n
More than just surreal, these pictures contain coded political allusions and covertly expose the \u201ccontradictions of Soviet society\u201d. Some photos mock the celebratory distortions of Soviet posters, creating an alternative iconography. A 1980s collection called Unfinished Dissertation is a bleakly brilliant assemblage of apparently inconsequential shots on the back of typed pages from a discarded dissertation found in a rubbish bin, symbols of frustration and waste.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/From-the-series-Red-1968-75.-\u00a9-Boris-Mikhailov-VG-Bild-Kunst-Bonn-Courtesy-Boris-and-Vita-Mikhailov-.jpeg\")
From the series \u201cRed\u201d, 1968-75. \u00a9 Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov<\/p>\n
An artist who creates confronting and sometimes controversial images, his post-Soviet series Case History is represented here by a glass case full of small photos rather than the usual larger wall-sized images. The staged portraits document the grim lives of homeless people in his home city. \u201cI felt it was my social responsibility to photograph these people,\u201d says Mikhailov. His catalogue of horrors is laced with compassion, but can feel prurient: drunk old women with bare breasts, tattered, toothless men with no trousers.<\/p>\n
The photographer is equally willing to compromise his own dignity. In the series, I am Not I (1992), he poses naked for numerous satirical self-portraits with a huge plastic phallus, an enema bag, a sword and ridiculous curly wig. \u201cThe country was changing,\u201d explains Mikhailov. \u201cIf in the Soviet era, we knew who the heroes were, now the very idea of a hero had been destroyed. So there could only be an anti-hero.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is Mikhailov\u2019s first major UK retrospective. He lives now with his wife Vita in Berlin and Kharkiv, Ukraine\u2019s much-bombed second city, close to the border with Russia.\u00a0Some of the more recent photos, titled \u201cThe Theatre of War\u2026\u201d show the dramatic 2013-2014 pro-European uprisings in Maidan Square, known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it might have been more accurate to title this series \u201cPremonition of War\u2026 \u201d the artist comments. \u201cThe bonfires, the colours, the lights, the people sitting there exhausted \u2026 It was unclear how it would all end.\u201d A decade on, it\u2019s less clear than ever how the war will end, but Mikhailov\u2019s photos now have an added poignancy, a sense of the powerful resilience and uniqueness of Ukrainian culture, even after years of brutal invasion.<\/p>\n
Runs alongside Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record until 22 February 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n \t\t\tThe Reviews Hub Star Rating <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t80%<\/p>\n \t\t\tPowerful and poignant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Flags and banners, a tractor, a soldier with a pink rose, a cracked scarlet table with plastic flowers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[162488,748,393,4884,257,95527,2249,6080,16,162489,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-493252","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-boris-mikhailov","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-photographers-gallery","14":"tag-photography","15":"tag-review","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-ukrainian-diary","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115360523512238998","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}