The Ukrainian photographer’s work takes on a new prescience following the Russia’s invasion
When Paris’s art curators met to discuss staging a major retrospective of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov’s work, none could have guessed how prescient and tragic its eventual timing would turn out to be – or how his depictions of the poverty of the Soviet Union and the grim hardship of its aftermath would take on new meaning following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the razing of his home town, Kharkiv, which features in so many of his photographs.
Mikhailov’s blue-tinted series of 111 pictures taken in newly independent Ukraine’s second largest city after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, titled At Dusk, are bleak. There is little evidence of the much-vaunted grandeur of the Soviet Union as proudly declaimed by various leaders in Moscow. The system had changed, but the penury and hardship of people’s lives had not, as shown by the stark images of men, women and children captured in the detritus of a desolate urban landscape.
