A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.
- Roland Barthes¹

The beauty of looking into these places without actually being present there is that the excursionist is spared the vulgar sounds and odious scents and repulsive exhibitions attendant up such a personal examination.
- Jacob Riis²

The inherent contradiction exemplified in the above quotations has been the ethical conundrum that has plagued photography since its inception, both in Barthes's claim for empathic visceral connectivity, and in Riis's celebration of discrete voyeuristic verisimilitude. To this end, it is difficult to imagine that any practice could have received a more complete dismantling and demotion by the 1970s' art-world discourse than the tradition of documentary photography. Ceremoniously stripped of its currency, the social-documentary project found itself under siege from both aesthetic formalist and structuralist / post-structuralist positions that vied for dominance over the nature and history of photography. The former - whose clearest voice was that of John Szarkowski, the highly influential curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art - cited its woeful insistence on narration which was 'generally achieved at the expense of photographic discovery', and its claim for a transparency that distanced it from the validity of authorship and personal expression (a strategy that fought to deliver photography a more auspicious painterly pedigree) as justification for its demise.³ A perhaps even more damning critique emanated from the latter, which took specific issue with documentary photography's positivist claims for objectivity, and ironically dismissed it on the very social, moral and ethical grounds upon which the tradition had been founded.

While some semblance of the tradition remained (the most provocative examples of which were produced by the most vehement critics of its liberal humanist-naiveté), the majority of practitioners who clung to the possibility of a direct response to the social milieu within a museum context did so only under a literalisation of the programme put forward by Szarkowski, most notably within his seminal 1967 exhibition 'New Documents'. This exhibition heralded artists who had once worked in journalistic formats and turned the document to distinctly 'personal ends'. Opting for a more pronounced declaration of the presence of the maker within the image, and a dismissal of the socio-political dimension as something directly representable, practitioners veered toward a mode of production that echoed William Eggleston. His centrally-framed colour images of evacuated interiors, isolated figures and objects displaced the radical upheaval going on in the American South (one that just so happened to directly question his own identity as a Southern white aristocrat) in favour of personal ciphers of alienation. Those that acknowledged the political and ethical concerns aired about the often prescriptive direct representation of the public realm emerged in a vein of photography that dealt with the alienation of the figure from the contemporary landscape, systematically depopulating traditional sites of social exchange (for example, downtowns, factories, businesses, suburban developments, etc.).⁴ Photographs that were still predicated upon their ability to see into the hidden world of others, and thus claim an empathic connectivity, increasingly turned to the isolated realm of the personal. Thus in the snapshot roughness of Nan Goldin, later exemplified in the practices of Wolfgang Tillmans and Richard Billingham, the problematic assertions of total transparency and social efficacy were diffused by the metamorphosis of documentary into diary. These artists avoided the contentious claim for the stable and relevant transcription of 'reality' in favour of stylistic familiarity (for example, the family photo album), thereby reaffirming their own immediacy and proximity to the viewer through the simulation of the debased vernacular of the snapshot. In this sense photography relinquished its long-held position as the aesthetic preserver of history, as if taking Kracauer's famously pessimistic appraisal that photography 'sweeps away the dams of memory ... threaten[ing] to destroy the potentially existing awareness of crucial traits' as a bare fact, not a warning.⁵

The art world's photographic taste for these faux-naïve diaries and the revivalist formalism of monolithic transcriptions of evacuated postmodern geographies and glazed stares of alienated figures indicates its almost unanimous hesitance to reopen socio-political questions of representation. It suggests we are trapped in a prolonged lamentation of the defeat of liberal humanism, and the subsequent erosion of its core terms - 'liberty', 'freedom' and 'democracy' - in a jingoist hijacking by neo-conservative elements. The photographic repertoire of strategies appears reduced to the symbolic insinuation of external conditions, and an abandonment of direct intervention and contestation. In contradistinction to other practices, photography seems to have embraced a role as the conservator of rarefied aesthetic tradition, one that will likely, in time, be spoken of with the same derision that the early Avant-gardes reserved for salon painting.

Under what was, to some extent, a parallel condition of resignation - both by the direct repression of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet sanitisation of the shift to capitalism - the work of Boris Mikhailov found its form. Evasive and multivalent, Mikhailov's practice moves between a range of stylistic approaches. I first came upon his images outside of book form at the opening of the politely austere exhibition 'Cruel and Tender' at Tate Modern (2002). Amid the processions of contemplation, polite chit-chat and lazy strolls of the opening's attendants, I noticed people emerging from one of the exhibition halls more briskly than usual. There I found the almost floor-to-ceiling prints from Mikhailov's Case History (1999): rough-hewn photographs tacked directly to the wall, depicting the bomzhes (which he defines as 'homeless without any social support') of his native Ukraine in various states of undress.⁶ The tension in the gallery was palpable. People seemed to stand at attention around the photographs, resting uncomfortably in the centre of the space, careful to keep their distance from the images as if actually being confronted by half-naked homeless men and women. The harsh grain of the 35mm film enveloped the print, matching the battered and sometimes diseased bodies that presented themselves so willingly to the camera - a condition of bodily dissolution that had been neatly expunged from the saccharine visions of a post-Soviet democracy. Mikhailov paid each of his subjects and asked them to disrobe; the vulgarity of this transaction is made evident. The acknowledgement of the exchange rate of bodies and the interplay of dominance and subordination in the act of viewing another were inscribed on their surfaces, a difficult pill to swallow on a leisurely stroll through the museum. The social contract, in its moment of harrowing disintegration, brought forth a vision of the body that echoed that of a medical examination, and simultaneously underscored the history of physiognomic investigation sublimated in contemporary portraiture. The images are as violent in their unblinking transcription of suffering as in their insistence on the necessity to take notice, even if only to upend the conditions that made them possible.

The particularly precarious contemporary problem faced by those who seek to directly confront and undermine dominant ideological structures is the danger of being subsumed by the very thing opposed, implicitly reinforcing the strength of that which they seek to dismantle. This situation was succinctly described by Judith Butler, when she wrote, 'dominance appears most effectively as its "Other"', outlining that the dialectic of 'dominance and opposition' is rendered illusory though the 'instrumental use that the former makes of the latter'.⁷ Most problematic of all, we run the risk of assuming an authority (although borrowed) synonymous with that dominant structure, a strategy that Allan Sekula surmised 'preclude(s) the possibility of anything but affirmation', and subsequently naturalises a mode of address whose primary function is that of subordination.⁸ This is, for all intents and purposes, the crux of the argument levied at the tradition of documentary photography - through its instrumentalisation at the hands of the dominant classes, it re-victimises those it proposes to save, reifying their otherness.⁹ That is perhaps because photography is founded on the impenetrable scopic remove of spectacle, enacted in the techno-mediation between photographer and subject, and recreated at the safe distance of its audience, whether they are readers of a magazine or visitors to a museum who are given tacit permission to revel in a fetish for character and form.

The figure of the aloof flâneur haunts photography, providing its cool distance and voyeuristic proclivities. But Mikhailov engages with neither flânerie, nor its Situationist counterpart, the dérive, with its procedures of dandy provocations and free-associative absurdities. While the flâneur melancholically stalks his subjects and the dérive willfully suspends the social codification of the modern city in a totalised refusal of its symbolic order, Mikhailov rummages through matter he is presented with. Unafraid to get his hands dirty, he runs them through every crevasse in search of something he can put to his own use. It is physicality that is his interface; he is something of a guerrilla bricolleur, a scavenger. Mikhailov collects his materials as his subjects do, searching in the forgotten and discarded, piecing together minor histories and totemic memorials.

Such scavenging was in large part a necessity within the former Soviet Union, where the territories available to the photographer without journalistic sanction were limited to the zones the state did not have access to, or chose not to trespass upon. Materials were often in short supply, dictating that artists employ both an economy of means and the rough assemblage evidenced in their productions. Despite the increased availability after the fall of communism, Mikhailov continues to work within these limitations. He persistently employs these markers of obsolescence, which operate both as a memory trace and a dual refusal of the homogenising effect of Soviet prescriptions and late capitalism's endless procession of the new. In Unfinished Dissertation (1985) a series of photographs are fixed onto a discarded and incomplete academic text found in the street, turning it into something of an aesthetic treatise and personal diary. You look at me I look at water (2002) also employs found materials. Both reintegrate personal texts into the matrix of photographic representation but the results are fragmentary, momentary thoughts and second-hand accounts. Arranged in a piecemeal reconstruction of subjectivity, they are developed from scraps and represented in a form traditionally used in the black-market traffic of pornography (an appropriate reconstitution for the personal proclivities repressed in the Soviet era). There is an equivalence between the ragged yellow pages adorned with often-marked up snapshots and the passing memories transcribed in ballpoint pen. Gracing the margins of the stained pages are recollections of news stories and people Mikhailov photographed, along with more elliptical poetic notations and laconic humour. Ever-present is a practice of 'making do', evident in Mikhailov's appropriation of refuse as the staging ground for the personal, and in his attraction to the interstitial sites photographed, which offer both the privacy needed to produce outside of the State and the occasion to document the multiple negotiations and appropriations required in adapting to the strictures of the former Soviet Union. In the summer of 1986, Mikhailov began documenting a summer ritual practiced by the proletarian population of the city of Slavyansk. Working-class families crowd the unsightly beaches amidst industrial detritus and the passing of freight trains, while the plump bodies of the ailing and the elderly gently float in the pools of salt water, a by-product of the Soda factories that frame the horizon. In the shadow of an industry that ravaged the landscape, the communities formulate their own strategies of co-existence, and even counter mythologies to the industrial secularism (many share the belief that the pools have medicinal effects). The photographs themselves are dark, over-printed and deeply toned, as if stained by the landscapes they depict. Flecks of dust, hairs and nicks in the emulsion are framed by the dark smudges of gelatin-silver directly exposed to light, giving them an echo of nostalgia while insistently foregrounding the material conditions of the photograph, even as we become immersed in the scene.

Mikhailov applies this approach again in his first post-Soviet series, By the Ground (1991). Far bleaker than its earlier counterpart, By the Ground employs similarly dark-toned black-and-white photographs. This time freed from the prohibition of photography in public spaces, the streets of Kharkov and Moscow became his subject. Still, moments of lightness touch the images: young girls are caught playing in an alley; lovers tussle in a public park; and passers-by are caught in awkward personal displays on the street. But ever-present in these images is the increasingly bleak city that surrounds them. Empty streets and back alleys strewn with rubble form the backdrops in which his subjects continue their routines, despite the uncertainty that haunt their faces. With increasing regularity, isolated figures appear adrift along the concrete boulevards, the dissolution of communism's 'great experiment' creating its first wave of abject poverty. The signs of isolation that begin to surface in By the Ground dominate his next series, At Dusk (1993). Shot exclusively in Kharkov, At Dusk presents what would seem to be highly populated areas as abandoned macabre stage sets waiting to be activated by the onset of liberal democracy. Individuals haunt the shadows; they are found slumped on benches and perched on topographies that seem more post-war than newly democratic. It is here that the corrupted medium of the photographic documentary - at its moment of complete disappearance from the economy of contemporary artistic production - is recovered and redeployed in a form that betrays the simultaneous erosion of both its efficacy and the ideals it strove for. The communal intimacy that marked Salt Lake (2002) appears all but evacuated. It is in this series that we begin to see the focus of Mikhailov's next body of work, the desperate conditions of the bomzhes.

Case History was originally intended to be the third part of a trilogy. In chromatic progression from By the Ground's deep brown and At Dusk's modelled cyan, Case History was to be Mikhailov's pink work. As he writes, the pink 'corresponded to a revival of new life, like during a sunrise, when the light is evenly covering the whole surface.'¹⁰ But upon his return he was confronted with something altogether different. New prosperity had been born, but only with deepening levels of desperation. The grey streets were adorned with foreign advertisements, and brightly coloured kiosks brandishing the names 'Agfa', 'Konica' and 'Fuji' made available the newly arrived colour photography as if providing ground-floor entry to the spectacular vistas held aloft on billboards. The shiny signifiers of the arrival of the free market matched the ubiquity of their neighbours' abject bodily existence as the newly expanded class of the homeless grew. Mikhailov referred to the proliferation of colour photographs and their new availability as a 'rash on an ill body.'¹¹ The abject bodily trauma of the images comprising Case History resonate in the dissolution of the once-idealised totality of the proletarian body politic of the Soviet regime, fractured and stratified into those who were able to integrate into the free market, and those who were abandoned in its margins, everywhere present, yet uncannily invisible in the image of the now 'liberated' society. Mikhailov's staged return of the body in a state of disrepair contrasts starkly with his playful investigation of the mundane body of the average Soviet citizen. Both unmake the hermetically sealed body of the totalitarian ideal, expert in its pure transformation and control of carnal drives, while upsetting the sexualized figments of free-market imagination by their direct depiction of poverty and disease, intertwined with a similar invitation of the viewer's gaze. Here Barthes's famous comparison of the fleeting power of the photograph to a wound is supplanted by an infestation of the 'common skin' he saw evidenced in photography.¹²

Boris Groys has commented that the reason Mikhailov's Case History is so disturbing is that the 'frail, ruined and repulsive bodies of the homeless people in these photographs are ... presented as erotic bodies'.¹³ The relationship we have to them, as with the personal snapshot, is one of immediacy, in this moment reversing its benevolent stewardship over our personal memories and inscribing within it the chaos and trauma our collective histories so expertly sublimate. In this sense, Mikhailov recovers - as he does with his re-use of discarded material - the visceral phenomenological connectivity of the documentary photograph and the mnemonic potential it once presumed to maintain, reopening the ethical and social questions that persist despite their contemporary collective disavowal. As Mikhailov wrote, 'I was interested in the borders of a new morality which would suit the new borders of survival.'¹⁴ Such investigation is long overdue, and while his work is far from solving many ethical contradictions, its repeated emphasis on the necessity for an active engagement in these debates provides a viable pathway out of the anomic retreat of contemporary art at a moment when the stakes appear to be unusually high. Photography is still in possession of the potential for emphatic resistance that this 'carnal medium' once wielded so effectively.

— Walead Beshty