RED

In the Face of History, the recent exhibition on European photography in the 20th century at the Barbican in London is now over! Here is a totally subjective focus on Boris Mikhailov, one of the exhibited artists :

Boris Mikhailov was born in1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine; He lives and works in Berlin.
Until 1986 in the Soviet-dominated Ukraine it was forbidden for photographers to make nudes or to take pictures in the city from a point higher than the second floor of a building. In 1996, after the KGB found his photographs of his naked wife, Boris Mikhailov lost his job as a mechanical engineer. He secured another job as a technical photographer, whilst beginning, in his spare time, to forge one of the most important bodies of conceptual/documentary photography of the late 20th century. Mikhailov exhibited in artist-friends’ apartments in his hometown of Kharkov until he was able to show internationally in the 1990s.

Red, 1968–75—in Russian, the word ‘red’ sounds like the word ‘beautiful’—is Mikhailov’s satirical response to Soviet occupation, and the saturation of Ukraine’s social landscape by the ‘ideological’ colour ‘red’. He set out to document every speck of red he found in the landscape—and he finds it in surprising places. Mikhailov commenced Red a year earlier than the American William Eggleston started work on his famous Guide, generally held in the West to be the first major work of colour photography. The fact that colour photography was an almost unheard of luxury in the Ukraine, added to the sheer danger of photographing in the street, makes Red an even more significant achievement.

Useful links:
www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=4340
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/boris_mikhailov.htm

Photo: © Boris Mikhailov - Red, USSR, 1968-1975 (Detail) / Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur.