Rarely has anyone photographed reality in such an honest way as Boris Mikhailov. One of the leading photographers from the former Soviet Union, he is best known for his visual narratives of angst, penury, urban ruin, and mental illness, in pictures devoid of aesthetic exaltation. A social documentarian, Mikhailov poetically describes the sad realities obscured by the rapid economic growth that the former Communist Bloc has recently undergone.
With Look at Me, I Look at Water—composed in 1999—Mikhailov is continuing, thematically and conceptually, what he began with his artist's book Unfinished Dissertation in 1985. The pictures describe a range of unstable states, and also the intensity of some obscure quest, a quest which is also a sort of experiment.