Hasselblad Award - Brief Article

Afterimage, Sept, 2000

The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation has selected Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov as the winner of the 2000 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. Mikhailov, who lives in Charkov, Ukraine and Berlin, was born in 1938 in Charkov and trained as an engineer. He took up photography at the age of 28. He lost his factory job shortly thereafter when the KGB discovered nude photos he had taken of his wife, and thus began a full-time career as a photographer.

Mikhailov works in extended series that tend to be quite different from one another in form, making attempts to define his photographic style a difficult task. What has remained consistent throughout his career is his belief that the function of photography is to further the viewer's understanding of the relationship between individuals and society. Many of his early works such as the "Private Series" (late 1960s), the "Red Series" (1968-75) and "Luriki" (1971-85), while playful, nevertheless critiqued Soviet iconography, institutions and propaganda. "The new freedom" occasioned by the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought Mikhailov both financial success and artistic freedom but it also brought a new set of problems. The series "By the Ground" (1991) and "At Dusk" (1993) examine life in the newly capitalistic Ukraine where people were struggling to survive in the wake of the new order. In 1998, Mikhailov published the elegant Unfinished Dissertation, a project he initiated in 1984, in which he glued small black and white documentary photographs of everyday events in Charkov onto the back of his uncle's unfinished lecture notes, and later added various handwritten fragments of text to the photographs.

"Boris Mikhailov is unquestionably the leading photographer with a 'Soviet background' today," states a Foundation press release. He "continues to develop his great theme--his narrative of the wreck of the Soviet utopia. Boris Mikhailov's stance is critical; his work is consistently humanist in approach ... Despite working under extremely difficult circumstances, he has always succeeded in creating deeply engaging and exciting photographic art."

The prize, which consists of 500,000 Swedish Kronas (about U.S. $56,000) and a gold metal, will be presented to the photographer in a ceremony in Goteborg, Sweden in November. An exhibition of Mikhailov's work will coincide with the ceremony.