A monochromatic exhibition of Boris Mikhailov’s photographs is currently on view at the Dominique Lévy gallery in New York. On the first floor is the blue series At Dusk, featuring 110 panoramic photographs barely 30 centimeters wide and displayed in a row, giving it a very cinematic look.
Mikhailov takes repeated shots from the same angle, sometimes minutes and week apart, which increases the narrative continuity of the series. He doesn’t hesitate to cut faces and bodies out of his photographs, and shoots from just above the ground, instilling his compositions with movement.
The panoramic format is undoubtedly photographic – it frames more narrow and elongated scenes than the 16:9 movie screens -, and serves as a metaphor for the social consequences following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine. Their distorted perspectives reflect the country’s instability. The tense postures of the characters show the unforgiving climate. Pedestrians collapse on the sidewalk under the harshness of social conditions. A foggy blue tint blurs the photographs, at dusk, facing the abysses of the chaotic and difficult post-1991 era.
As in the 1927 film Napoleon, in which the director, Abel Gance, famously made use of three different tinted films, the next floor displays green photographs. Be their color the symbol for hope, those two wide diptychs 2.5 meters high are sore representation of social austerity. The happy days are over. They were back in 1980, when Boris Mikhailov was in Crimea photographing his friends in playful compositions where their bodies writhe with joy. In this third series, he parodies studio and fashion portraits in order to play a carefree ode that serves as a counter-balance to the Ukrainian requiem he has been composing since the 1990s.
Boris Mikhailov
Four Decades
Until February 8th, 2014
Dominique Levy Gallery
909 Madison Avenue
NY 10021 New York
USA
T: +1 212 772 2004
http://www.dominique-levy.com
