The look is weary, and behind the mustache the smile has faded. Since Vladimir Putin’s offensive against his country, Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov has had his heart in shreds. If he put his luggage in Berlin in 2007, the 84-year-old man never broke with his country. He thinks about it constantly.
Located 40 kilometers from the Russian border, Kharkiv, his hometown, has been shelled relentlessly for six months. “The tears of Ukraine accompany us”, he whispers. His voice cracks: “Understand, what is happening is very serious, it invades life and crushes everything. » His wife, Vita, takes over when emotion overwhelms him: “It’s a kind of dread that paralyzes, blocks, shocks and angers. »
Around them, a big honey-colored cat comes and goes, indifferent to their torments. Their daughter and granddaughter took him on fleeing the country to join them. “We caress it all the time to calm us down”, Boris Mikhaïlov breathes, his eye still riveted on the information from the front. His gaze only comes alive when he talks about photography. His sentences race. “The images taken by anonymous people in Ukraine should be collected, he said, bring them together to produce an artistic work. »
A human adventure
Boris Mikhailov would have liked to be in Ukraine right now, his lens capturing all of its recent history – the Soviet period, its pretense, its lingering vestiges. But also the barricades of Maidan, when, in 2014, his compatriots challenged, in the large central square of kyiv, the president, pro-Russian, Viktor Yanukovych, in the name of democracy. His rich career is now the subject of an exhibition at the National Institute of Art History and a retrospective at the European House of Photography (MEP) in Paris.
In October, the Bourse de commerce, the Parisian museum of François Pinault, will in turn celebrate this ferocious observer of the human race, by hanging his series “At Dusk” (“at dusk”): a hundred images, taken in the years 1990, repainted with a blue wash. In November, finally, he will find the picture rails of Suzanne Tarasieve, the energetic Parisian gallery owner who made him discover twenty years ago to the French public.
Boris Mikhailov is the best-known Ukrainian photographer in the art world. In his own country, he is even more than that: he is the figurehead of a major movement in the arts of his nation, the Kharkiv School of Photography.
“The Kharkiv school is a unique way of looking at the world, with totally democratic values. » Sergiy Lebedynskyy, photographer
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