This is the first book published on Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov’s (b. 1938) early body of work, entitled the Superimposition series. An artist, documentary photographer and social observer, Mikhailov has experimented with many photographic styles and his work is highly respected by both the photography world and contemporary art lovers. In this series from the late 60s to early 70s, he has overlaid two colour slides, to create "sandwiches", i.e beautifully composed tableaux of glamorous women, surreal urban landscapes and strange scenes of everyday Soviet life.
"Each image is made of several slides superimposed to form the 'visual sandwich'. The results are fascinating, varying from the surreal and the disturbing to the beautiful and the sublime... [An] excellent publication."—Amateur Photographer
Hardback, 124 pages, 34 x 23cm, published by Phaidon, now out of print
Born in 1938 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and trained as an engineer, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Early in his career, he was given a camera in order to document the state-owned factory where he was employed; he used it to take nude photographs of his wife. He developed them in the factory’s laboratory, and was fired after they were found by KGB agents.
Today seen as one of the most important figures on the international art scene, he has received many prestigious awards, among them the 2015 Goslar Kaiserring Award, the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (now the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Award) in 2001 and the Hasselblad Award in 2000. He represented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and again in 2017.
