[The Guardian] Photographer Boris Mikhailov’s Ukrainian Diary: ‘He is a kind of proto-punk’

Photographer Boris Mikhailov’s Ukrainian Diary: ‘He is a kind of proto-punk’

The provocative work of the self-taught Ukrainian spans nearly 60 years, from Soviet oppression and glasnost to today. Now the outsider comes in for a major retrospective in Paris – and a new book

Born in 1938, Boris Mikhailov grew up in the industrial city of Kharkov (now Kharkiv) in what was then Soviet Ukraine. “There was nothing there to influence me,” he said of his formative years as a photographer. “I found myself in a sort of zero state – a state of total openness.” Without any knowledge of photography’s history, traditions and categories, he became a self-taught artist in the truest sense, his work driven by his fertile imagination, absurdist humour and apparent disregard for accepted notions of technical excellence or formal composition.

Next month, those quintessentially Mikhailovian elements will be on display at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, which will host an extensive retrospective of his work. Titled Ukrainian Diary, it features selected works from 27 projects made over the past 50 years. It is an interesting time to exhibit his work, not least because Mikhailov’s Ukraine is not the Ukraine currently fixed in the popular imagination – a European-style country whose progressive principles and Europeanised culture so incensed Vladimir Putin that he declared war on its citizens. (The exhibition, and an accompanying book, were planned before the invasion and both are dedicated “to Ukraine and to all who are suffering from the treacherous and incomprehensible attack on our motherland, with great sorrow and endless compassion.”)

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