'Case History' explores the break-up of the Soviet Union by focusing on its human casualties - the homeless living on the margins of Ukraine’s new economic regime without social support or care. Published in 1999, it won the Krazna-Krausz Photography Book Award. This is a grim document and a work of fine art in one. The pictures are staged but the people posing for them are painfully real and the presented surroundings are part of their real life.
The artist pays the homeless in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov to pose for him. He gets them to drop their trousers or open their ragged coats to show the camera their bodies - destroyed by alcohol and sickness - cheap tattoos and scars. Brutally exposing the poverty of their existence, but in their poses and gestures he is looking for a known scene from pictorial iconography. The artist sees it this way:
“These are real people in Case History. The only thing that changes is how they are posed and that they are naked. I posed these people in poses that remind me of the history of art or of gestures that I saw in life. Sometimes I asked them to repeat a gesture that they made so I could photograph it. With Case History, I wanted to find a metaphoric image of life. For example, how do you show prostitution? Nakedness doesn’t begin to describe this condition, so I asked my models to pull up their clothes as a metaphor for their life. For Case History, old documentary methods weren’t possible—it was important and necessary for me to find new methods to show this life”.
In some respects Mikhailov thinks more like a painter than a photojournalist. His activity can be compared to those of artists like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall, photographers whose staged, socially provocative stories refer to the tradition of painting. Only, with the difference that Mikhailov’s scenes are created strictly from what the artist unexpectedly encountered in the alleys of his city.
Mikhailov is not especially concerned with the personal particulars of his models. Under his direction the subjects are actors, who function mainly as allegorical symbols. But “the artist does not avoid moral complexities, paying his models to pose in these ambiguous interventions, thus emphasising the tenuous relationship between photographer and model, voyeur and victim. It is Mikhailov’s intention to demonstrate the vulnerability and helplessness of his subjects, defending his belief that it is better to document and draw attention to the suffering and degradation of his subjects than to ignore it.”
This all means that in the artistic visions of Mikhailov, the line between documentary photography and painting is even more blurred.
text from b.s.
The artist pays the homeless in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov to pose for him. He gets them to drop their trousers or open their ragged coats to show the camera their bodies - destroyed by alcohol and sickness - cheap tattoos and scars. Brutally exposing the poverty of their existence, but in their poses and gestures he is looking for a known scene from pictorial iconography. The artist sees it this way:
“These are real people in Case History. The only thing that changes is how they are posed and that they are naked. I posed these people in poses that remind me of the history of art or of gestures that I saw in life. Sometimes I asked them to repeat a gesture that they made so I could photograph it. With Case History, I wanted to find a metaphoric image of life. For example, how do you show prostitution? Nakedness doesn’t begin to describe this condition, so I asked my models to pull up their clothes as a metaphor for their life. For Case History, old documentary methods weren’t possible—it was important and necessary for me to find new methods to show this life”.
In some respects Mikhailov thinks more like a painter than a photojournalist. His activity can be compared to those of artists like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall, photographers whose staged, socially provocative stories refer to the tradition of painting. Only, with the difference that Mikhailov’s scenes are created strictly from what the artist unexpectedly encountered in the alleys of his city.
Mikhailov is not especially concerned with the personal particulars of his models. Under his direction the subjects are actors, who function mainly as allegorical symbols. But “the artist does not avoid moral complexities, paying his models to pose in these ambiguous interventions, thus emphasising the tenuous relationship between photographer and model, voyeur and victim. It is Mikhailov’s intention to demonstrate the vulnerability and helplessness of his subjects, defending his belief that it is better to document and draw attention to the suffering and degradation of his subjects than to ignore it.”
This all means that in the artistic visions of Mikhailov, the line between documentary photography and painting is even more blurred.
text from b.s.
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