Boris Mikhailov. Case History.

Returning to a changed city

Boris Mikhailov was born in 1938 in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. He is one of the most important photographers to come out of the former Soviet Union.

In 1996, after a period abroad, he returned to Kharkiv. The city had changed. Foreign billboards had appeared, a new capitalist façade laid over the old streets. But beneath that façade was a new class of people that had barely existed before.

They were called bomzhi, the long term homeless. They emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the old welfare system vanished faster than anything could replace it. They slept outdoors, lived at the edge of industrial districts, and the rest of the city tried not to see them.

Mikhailov decided to see them.

More than four hundred photographs

Case History is the series he made around 1997 and 1998, as MoMA dates it. The full body of work runs to more than four hundred pictures. In 1999 it was published as a book.

Mikhailov worked in a way that remains contested. He paid the people he photographed and bought them food and drink. They knew they were being photographed, and they posed. Many undressed, showing bodies marked by scars, wounds, and signs of illness and violence.

Many poses recall religious images familiar from European painting: a man with arms outstretched as if on a cross, one person cradling another as in a Pietà. The borrowing is neither reverent nor mocking. It places abandoned people exactly where old art placed sacred suffering.

Mikhailov has said he was looking for new ways to show this life, beyond ordinary documentary. Nakedness, for him, was a metaphor for their existence: nothing left to cover.

Life size on a museum wall

From 26 May to 5 September 2011, MoMA in New York showed Case History, the first American museum presentation devoted entirely to the series. It was organised by Eva Respini.

Nineteen photographs were chosen. Each was over two metres tall, close to life size. They were pinned at the top corners, the bottom corners left to curl away from the wall. No frames, no glass. The pictures hung in chronological order.

That way of hanging made them look fragile, almost provisional. It denied viewers the safe distance that a framed print under glass usually gives. The people in the pictures stood at eye level with the viewer, and looked back.

Set beside the portraits of Diane Arbus, a shared question appears: does photographing people at the margins let them be seen, or take one more thing from them?

Dignity and discomfort

Case History has drawn much criticism. Paying people with nothing left to undress for a camera is hard to defend. The question of exploitation travels with the work.

There is another reading too. Some critics argue that photographing so close, so directly and so large gives these people back something circumstance had taken: presence. They are no longer blurred figures on a street corner. They fill a museum wall.

Mikhailov does not resolve the contradiction, and perhaps does not want to. Case History leaves the viewer inside the discomfort. Its title, a medical record, says exactly that: a cold account of the condition of a social body at the moment it was breaking apart.