Boris Mikhailov

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. His unflagging critical engagement of photographic techniques and the work with different cameras and stylistic devicesas well as the alternation in his oeuvre between conceptual photography and documentary approaches render him the preeminent present-day photographer whose work reaches back to the Soviet era. 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. With essays by Thomas K hler, Christina Landbrecht, Olga Sviblova, and Jan Verwoert.