In the Swedish city of Goteborg Kharkiv photographer Borys Mykhailov received Hasselblad Award for 2000. Mr. Mykhailov has become the first photographer from the former Soviet Union to win this prize. The Victor Hasselblad Foundation awarded the “expressive artistic narration about everyday life of the common Kharkiv citizens from the sixties through the eighties” 500,000 Swedish kronas (about $50,000). Kharkiv native Borys Mykhailov is much more known in the West than in the CIS. Having appeared in Europe in the mid-eighties, he securely affixed himself within the world artistic elite. It would be naive to believe that it is only the “everyday life of common Kharkiv citizens” that brought him success. The reason is his “expressive artistic narration,” meaning the conceptuality of Mykhailov’s photo sessions.
The curators of the How You Look At It exhibit now touring Europe did not forget Mykhailov’s Near Land series (it was exhibited by Moscow’s XL Gallery) shot in Kharkiv in the early nineties. The history of the European everyday life, the topic of the exhibition, would be not complete without the monochromic dioramas by the Kharkiv photographer.
In conformity with the will of the curators of the exhibition, Mykhailov’s photos were placed near works describing everyday life in Paris during the 1930s, Brassai, and the American documentary photographers of the sixties and seventies, Diane Arbas and Garry Winogrand. Connected with this background Mykhailov’s shots look like a sentence pronounced on the very idea of the conscious documentation of reality. The photographer took pictures of Kharkiv without looking into the camera, holding it at the level of his breast. Having disclaimed authorship in selecting the object of the picture, Borys Mykhailov turned making pictures into a process of destroying the habitual photo artistry.
