Boris Mikhailov
[Photographer, b. 1938, Kharkov, Ukraine, lives in Kharkov and Berlin.]
As soon as I got to New York, in the late ‘80s, I went to Harlem. Everybody told me not to go, and if I went, not to take pictures. Of course I went, and I went with a camera.
I intuitively felt that photography was the field where I could express myself as a citizen and a human being.
You photograph one object, then another, you place them between one another and this unintentional connection turns into a story about life in its entirety. And all this is born from chance, and this chance is photography.
It’s not important how you show something. It’s important to show it at the right time.
Manipulating with money is somehow a new way of legal relations in all areas of the former USSR... I wanted to transmit the feeling that in that place and now, people can be openly manipulated... I wanted to copy or perform the same relations which exist in society between a model and myself.
I know people do not want to look at such photos, but only if you look at misery in a picture do you start to notice it in the street.
