Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective

For more than 40 years, Boris Mikhailov has used photography to document and come to grips with the turmoil of life under the Soviets, and after the Soviets. In this heavy-weight retrospective book, we are able to trace both Mikhailov’s personal history as well as the evolving photographic techniques he used in so many ways in his efforts to try to explain, document and understand the world around him. 

Several illuminating essays accompany the photographs, and provide historical, emotional, and intellectual contexts that add a richness of understanding to the massive body of work.

The introduction to an accompanying exhibition at ICA Boston reads: "Boris Mikhailov's images, captured over more than 35 years, bring to life one of the most tumultuous chapters of the 20th century: the height, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union and its disturbing aftermath. Yet as they chart this extraordinary history, they also express the complex emotions and intellectual subtlety of a powerful artist. Mikhailov's work ranges from the covert transgressions of a critical mind under a totalitarian regime to the tender depictions of the intimate life of his friends, his family and himself.”