The agonistic spirit reminiscent of Ancient Greece pervaded Russia under Brezhnev. Friendly drinking sessions, walks, camping holidays and unofficial seminars were exhilarating. People went rock-climbing, travelled in search of Shangri-La, visited art exhibitions held in private flats, and attended underground rock concerts, lectures by the semiotician Yuri Lotman and exhibitions of American graphics. All kinds of 'confessions' existed side by side in society: those who supported the restoration of the monarchy, Jew-bashers, Zionists, Russian orthodox believers, followers of the occult and Oriental religions, the postmodernists, hippies, old believers, Trotskyites, liberal Westernisers, moderate Slavophiles, Castaneda's followers, Gnostics, Stalinists and out-and-out Epicureans.¹

These are the words of a contemporary 'eyewitness' describing 'developed socialism'. One could add another item to this list of spontaneously formed groups - the nationwide movement of amateur photographers. It is within this context that Boris Mikhailov's creative identity was forged.

The intensity of this sub-cultural milieu offers some insight as to why Mikhailov's work, right from the beginning, was free of any signs of classical professional reportage. Mikhailov makes no attempt to compose or frame the picture according to the rules, or to recreate situations that would embody the idea of photography as 'fly-on the-wall' representation. Yet this was precisely the way that photography in the Soviet Schools of Journalism (the only professional places to study photography) was taught at a time when Cartier-Bresson was worshipped. Mikhailov's basic premise remains that of a dilettante delighted by the sheer capacity of a photograph's ability to capture a fragment of reality - any fragment of any reality.

Mikhailov's own particular technique stems from the idea of preserving the intrinsic link to the spontaneity of an ordinary visual experience. He is inclined to take photographs impulsively, with incredible speed and almost without looking through the viewfinder. This, however, is very different from the idea of the casual photograph that fascinated John Baldessari, for example. Mikhailov uses his technique in order to validate the continuous becoming of the visual experience. For this reason, he began using panoramic cameras, such as the Soviet Horizont, which has a swivelling lens that turns through 180 degrees as the picture is taken. The result is a horizontally elongated image with no central composition since the picture is stretched to its limits. The picture is overloaded with information and the eye wanders in the same way that it does when one looks at a real view without focusing on anything in particular. This approach is most apparent in Mikhailov's series of photographs By the Ground (1991) in which the sequence of images recreate what is seen by a pedestrian looking down.

The fact that Mikhailov always prefers amateur cameras to expensive professional equipment is symptomatic. The main body of his work is shot in black-and-white; this is representative of the photographic look that was dominant when he first started taking photographs. It was only in the middle of the 1990s, when cheap automatic cameras and Kodak print shops became part of the post-Soviet reality, that he started working with colour. From that moment colour photography became commonplace while black-and-white prints became synonymous with aestheticism. Mikhailov's range of subjects and themes is also that of an amateur. He takes pictures of family life - 'photographs to remember things by' - such as the arrival of a newborn child, Sunday leisure pursuits in the company of friends, a summer holiday by the sea, public holidays in his native city and curious street incidents.

In the 1980s Mikhailov made a significant number of photographs where nothing much seems to be happening and the images themselves lack any particular expression. They look like pictures taken by someone who has just learned how to use a camera and is aimlessly shooting everything around him. During the second half of the 1980s, in another gesture typical of amateur photographers, he placed these photographs in albums with accompanying comments on everyday life, banal philosophical remarks and quotes from books he had read. This work was entitled An Unfinished Dissertation, and was published as a book by Scalo in 1999. On the second page of one album, next to two unevenly placed discoloured photographs of a snow-covered provincial street, there is the inscription: 'Phenomenology is an intuitive perception of ideal essences (phenomena) possessing true authenticity.'² It is clear, from this, that Boris Mikhailov knew precisely what he was doing.

The fact that the artist is capable of defining the theory behind his art so precisely - linking his interest in the everyday with a phenomenological tradition in philosophy - is not in the slightest at odds with the 'amateurism' I have just described. The amateur subculture was not unenlightened or unarticulated. On the contrary, as the statement quoted at the beginning of this text rightly points out, the period of developed socialism was an exceptionally intellectual and dynamic one: Soviet society, unable to satisfy consumer demands, pointed the population in the direction of cultural consumption and creative expression. In fact An Unfinished Dissertation has the physical appearance of a genuine typewritten dissertation on science or technology, bound as required for academic presentation with the photos glued onto the empty reverse of each page. In this way Mikhailov appealed to the intelligentsia - the huge intellectual infrastructure created in the USSR at that time was in fact a substantial group. This social class came to an unwritten agreement with the authorities along the lines of 'you pretend to pay us while we pretend to work', and introduced into society a system of values according to which the height of existence lies in the possibility of its constant self-reflection.³

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The status quo established in Soviet society brought to life another inexhaustible resource - the aestheticisation of everyday reality. The background to this lies in the fact that Soviet society, along with the rest of the Western world, had moved away from the modernist disciplinarian schematicism, and was fragmented into a network of independent groupings. As Soviet society entered the 'tribal epoch' - a term used by postmodern theorists - people lacked the possibility of expression through civil action.⁴ As a result, the Soviet people began to express themselves in behaviour that was performative. This social practice is reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of 'carnival culture' that was fashionable at the time. It also prompted the appearance of eminent schools of semiotics and cultural typology, where academics like Yuri Lotman and Leonid Batkin adopted these aesthetic codes of social behaviour and the exaggerated forms of which they saw around them as the subject of their studies.

Many works by Boris Mikhailov have a direct relationship to these behavioural artistic practices. Alongside photographs recreating the everyday, he made a number of works depicting scenes acted out in front of the camera with Mikhailov himself as one of the protagonists. The series Crimean Snobbery (1982) can be described as a photographic novel about two couples indulging in the most unbridled fooling about at a Crimean resort. You cannot exactly call these works staged, as the clownish behaviour of Mikhailov and his friends on the promenade was as much for their own enjoyment as it is for ours. The two sides of his work - contemplation and performance - are not, however, in conflict. Spontaneous carnivalesque behaviour was part of Soviet life at the time, while 'the presentation of Self in everyday life' was also at the centre of the phenomenological studies that Mikhailov in turn was interested in.⁵

Between the two creative poles already mentioned - the representation of the everyday and the performative acting-out of subjects - there are many other stages in Mikhailov's work. In the 1980s he made a series of photographs of his wife squeezing excess milk from her breast after giving birth to their child. We cannot be certain that the woman is acting for the camera, though it is obvious that she is aware of the camera being pointed at her. She plays along with the photographer, turning the eroticism and the physiology of the situation into a comic performance.

The element of performance in Mikhailov's work is also apparent in his handling of the prints. Not only does he stick them into albums or into fold-up picture books, but he sometimes paints on them: banners in the faded black-and-white photos become red; tulips, yellow; and the ribbons in the girls' plats, blue. Reality is filled with euphoria and imbecilic joy.

Finally, this element of performance is again present in Mikhailov's dramatic cycle Case History (1997-98), his best-known work of the last few years. His characters here are the homeless who pose for him as if professional models posing for professional photographers for some glamour magazine. Mikhailov attaches so much importance to the performative aspect of this work that he underlines it by including himself in some of the images - in some cases he can be seen taking the photograph, in others handing money over to the homeless people he has just employed. This is his way of showing that the carefree artistic existence of the late-Soviet period ended at the same time that the 'lovely era' ended.⁶ This way of life has been replaced by a stage on which spectacle society as a whole is acting out a play that includes even those actors who have been kicked onto the sidelines.

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Mikhailov considers his painted photographs from the Soviet time as being 'Sots Artistic'. With this work he came closest to the irony of the Sots-Art poetics, that - such as in the work of Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid - aimed at deconstructing the Soviet ideological heraldry. Yet in his analysis of Soviet everyday reality, he is also close to Moscow conceptualism - and to Ilya Kabakov in particular. The difference is that neither Kabakov nor Komar and Melamid ever posed as amateurs. Graduating from elite Moscow art schools, these latter artists saw themselves as professionals. And unlike Mikhailov, for whom reflection formed an intrinsic part of everyday experience, the Moscow conceptualists were locked into their own micro-society, occupying, as they put it, a meta-position with regards to the social unit.⁷ This position of analytical outsider determined the completely different methods that the conceptualists employed in their work. Kabakov's preferred formats included spreadsheets, sociological probes and analytical commentary, while reality for him was a strictly marshalled narrative. In Kabakov's hands the same reality that Mikhailov experienced personally became highly constructed. Mikhailov knew from his own experience that within Soviet society there were enormous gaps free of any disciplinary parameters. His characters are grotesque and comic, but they are full of life and inner freedom: the grotesque and the comic in them have nothing to do with them being victims or zombies. This reality has no place for existential fear either - the carnivalesque Soviet life is devoid of aggression, and reconciles the individual with the social unit. There is no need for him to 'fly into space' or 'run away naked' in search of freedom.

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Conceptualism and Sots-Art are products of the Moscow arena, the epicentre of the system in which the ideological and the semiotic mechanisms were more visual, while real life appeared more abstract. Mikhailov came from outside Moscow, and is therefore not only an 'amateur' but a provincial one at that. He was born in Kharkov, a not particularly picturesque industrial area; more of a 'non-place' than a city. Its severe and deserted spaces are the ones that appear in the 'horizontal' photographs of 1991 (By the Ground). Kharkov, though, is a city that has strong ties to an intellectual tradition.

The Mikhailov/Kabakov opposition mentioned above finds its counterpoint in the relationship between two Russian writers also from Kharkov and of the same generation: Eduard Limonov and Vladimir Sorokin. These two writers are as important for modern Russian literature as the two artists are for Russian art. Sorokin's interests lie in creating a metatext that is capable of containing the essence of Russian classical literature, which brings him close to Kabakov's territory. Limonov's novels, like Mikhailov's photographs, are confessional and autobiographical, much like a memoir or a diary. They both deal with very private, at times profoundly intimate and poignant experiences that include an element of transgression while mixing social practices with performance.

In some of his work Kabakov has also used real documentary material, sometimes of a confessional nature. For instance, he used his late mother's letters in the installation Life as an Offence (1989). But this material is dispersed throughout the elaborately staged 'total installation'. Kabakov did something similar in his installation The Ship (1964-83) when, after he had found a housing-office archive in a rubbish tip, he worked it into a configuration resembling a ship (a metaphor for a society sailing nowhere). Many of Kabakov's works are compositions or conceptual objects, created on behalf of a character whose presence is defined by the particular individual style of the works. He has called this 'character-based art'. Mikhailov's approach came closest to Kabakov's with his album An Unfinished Dissertation. In this work he combined words and pictures, a form of photo-text collage that Kabakov was the most significant practitioner of in contemporary Russian art. On the very first page of this album Mikhailov included the statement 'Every person ought to write a dissertation in their lifetime' - a direct reference to Kabakov's Life Plan (2000). With this statement Mikhailov puts himself forward as one of Kabakov's characters with his own life experience thereby making him real. Everything is authentic in this album, every letter and every photograph. The album has no ending; the dissertation is unfinished because life continues.

Free from professional constraints, Mikhailov, like any amateur, takes pictures of whatever interests him. His view of the world is fired by a natural curiosity - he wants to see things he has not seen before, or things that others have yet to see, or indeed don't want to, or are unable to see properly. As a result he is doomed to a non-conformism that is consistent, totally natural and deprived of any ideological a priori. He looks at reality with an unadulterated eye, and not through the prism of either an intellectual project or an ideological expectation. At a time when both Western and liberal public opinion in Russia were expecting 'the artist' to denounce 'real socialism', and when Soviet officialdom 'wanted' artists to project a glossy image of themselves, Mikhailov shunned these social duties in order to portray a life that was ridiculous, but full-blooded and free. In the same way, Mikhailov does not meet the expectations of the post-Soviet period. With his Case History series, he exposed the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the neo-liberal reforms that characterised the chaos in post-Soviet Russia, and, because of this, found himself in tune with public opinion, and even more so with public perception. After all, the problem was not so much that the Russian liberal-intelligentsia refused to talk about the new poverty and other terrible consequences, but rather that they failed to notice them. The only things they saw were signs of imminent capitalist prosperity. Case History was therefore greeted with astonishment, if not with outright anger. Only a certain cynicism typical of the post-Soviet period could find any justification for this work: the photographer was fulfilling the unrequired remit for those who won the Cold War. Yet this attitude did not demand images of human catastrophe; rather what it wanted, what it needed, was a testimony to the beneficial consequences of liberal ideas.

Mikhailov, unlike Limonov, is far from being an agent provocateur, an artist simply intent on exploding public taboos or causing media scandals. He is just a photographer, and does not believe that there is any heroic pathos attached to that particular role or status. The amateur subculture that has informed and shaped his work has forced Mikhailov to focus on life's inner meanings, aiming not so much for personal success as for an intuitive, artistic perception of the real social domain with all of its catastrophic demands and tragic consequences. As Mikhailov himself has recently said: 'The subjective is interesting only when it forms part of the whole.'⁸

Translated by Anna Pilkington

— Viktor Misiano