Morel Books is a London based independent publisher specializing in affordable limited edition art books and zines. Challenging and provocative, Mikhailov's photographs document human casualties living in post communist Eastern Europe after the demise of the Soviet Union. They are unflinching and ruthless depictions of poverty and the homeless (also known as Bomzhes) living in the margins of Russia's new economic regime without social support or care. This series presents a simulated wedding between two homeless people often naked and in sexual poses, set amongst their own surroundings."
This volume offers an overview of the career of the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov. The work of Mikhailov is seen through the eyes of filmmaker David Teboul who completed a documentary about the artist in 2010 - Boris Mikhailov: I've Been Here Once Before.
Since starting out as a photographer in the mid-1960s, Boris Mikhailov (b. Kharkov, Ukraine, 1938; lives and works in Kharkov and Berlin) has built a wide-ranging and strikingly multifaceted oeuvre. A virtuoso of his art, he has explored a great variety of ways of using the medium to paint a picture of his immediate surroundings that is as unsparing as it is ironic. The book--which accompanies his largest exhibition in Germany to date--brings together a selection of works that includes the experimental pictures of his early years as well as his most recent photographs created in Berlin.
Published to coincide with the presentation of the Hasselblad Award in Photography 2000 to Boris Mikhailov, and an exhibition of his work at the Hasselblad Center, Goteborg. This book includes photographs from the series entitled Dance.
Rarely has anyone photographed reality in such an unprettified way as Boris Mikhailov. He captures the unadorned and the natural; in pictures devoid of aesthetic exhaltation, he concentrates on people and their living conditions. On his journeys through Russia, Germany and his Ukrainian homeland, Mikhailov has equally observed the poor, the well-to-do, the outcasts and the homeless. Look at Me, I Look at Water was composed in 1999 at the suggestion of the Heiner Mller-Society when Boris Mikhailov's name was found in one of Heiner Mller's notebooks. With this book Mikhailov is continuing, thematically and conceptionally, what he began with his artist's book Unfinished Dissertation in 1985. The photographs are accompanied by handwritten Russian commentaries, which together give the impression of a private album which narrates stories from a chapter in the artist's life.
This volume - investigating the work of a particular photographer, in thisase, Boris Mikhailov - comprises a 4000-word essay by an expert in the field,5 photographs presented chronologically, each with a commentary, and aiography of the featured photographer.
The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art. The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism. Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process. Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.