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Review
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Case History by Boris Mikhailov was published by Scalo.
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Other work by Boris Mikhailov
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Other articles by Paul Tebbs
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from Case History
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from Case History
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from Case History
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from Case History
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Accountable Seeing
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The 'bomzhes' are the homeless of Russia. They attempt to exist on the margins of Russia's new economic regime without social support or care. Boris Mikhailov's book Case History begins with a visual testimony to three bomzh who died within two months of being photographed. A further 439 colour images intimately detail the physical conditions and bodily scarring suffered by the destitute living in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.
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The bomzh, are a new class of people within Russia. They are a consequence of the slow and punitive transition from socialism to a variant of capitalism. The bland visual signs that represent these one time opposing ideologies are dispersed to the periphery of Mikhailov's photographs. Lenin lingers here only as a man's chest tattoo, advertisements are rarely visible. Instead we are shown spaces of decay and inertia from which both the past and future have withdrawn their validity. Inertia allows the extreme to be banal in this context. In these spaces Mikhailov orchestrates a form of portraiture. His models are paid and asked to be 'who they are in reality'.
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This payment contractualises the documentary to the staged - thus self-consciously confusing the visual category and ethical basis of his practice. The payment secures the removal of his subjects' clothes. Mikhailov recognises his intervention as a 'non-ethical impulse' which he is bound ethically to accept. (Contemporary Russian artists were not permitted to exhibit the naked body in art exhibitions until 1986). It is an impulse provoking the everyday to speak its condition. An intervention at once necessary but perhaps exploitative. Of course, everyone asked had the right to refuse - 'you pose or you vanish'. Very few of these pictures however show people active within their own lives unaware of the camera. Taken from their lived circumstance their stasis measures their submission. Others perform and exhibit a spirit to live.
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Sometimes the subjects just drop their pants or raise their dresses in the street. Alternatively Mikhailov takes them to his flat to wash and be photographed. Mikhailov says, 'I took the pictures displaying naked people with their things in hands like people going to gas chambers'. There is death present in a spirit's absence of hope and once denuded, Mikhailov allows his subjects to move closer to or to resist their fate.
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Eyes can be keen before the naked - 'I was interested in what would happen to a face when a body gets undressed'. But often attention to the soul of the face is distracted by the body as object. The nudity of the body obscuring the truth of the face. One should resist the weak logic that substitutes the lost communality of the Soviet era for a democracy in nakedness.
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It is the very lack of movement in the eyes and mouth that marks the lack of hope. There is no resistance, there is no loss and no gain for some. One woman has a triangular protrusion from her stomach (she later died). The bodies are scarred and scabbed, eyes blackened, noses busted and bleeding, heads smashed, teeth rotten. These images refuse to aestheticize a dignity in the socially maimed. The conditions of our visual access refuse a nobility to our empathy also.
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For some of the models it is a positive space for self-expression. To display blistered male prowess. To lounge seductively with legs apart. To be desirable again. To be affectionate. It is an opportunity to regain a control over how one is seen.
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Both taking photographs and paying are modes of possession through which another's autonomy is altered, diminished, perhaps even denied. How a person is photographed is a measure of the power of vision over the subject and in some of these photographs only this power is apparent. The position of the viewer overwhelms the resistanceless subjects. The photographs never insinuate the visual perspective of the bomzhes themselves. This is necessary to Mikhailov's strategy. In contrast to the unaccountability inherent in the interiority of everyday seeing, Mikhailov constructs (photographic) seeing as an accountable act.
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Paul Tebbs
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