Boris Mikhailov
Tea Coffee Cappuccino
HC, 21 x 29,5 cm., 240 pp.
König 2011
"For Boris Mikhailov, societal changes are most clearly visible in small, everyday events. While the waiter in Ukraine would still be asking tea or coffee? during the Soviet era, the question today is tea, coffee, cappuccino? In his newest works, Mikhailov tackles precisely these changes and captures as he has already in By the Ground / At Dusk (Oktagon, 1996) daily life in his hometown Charkow. In this collection of more than 200 colour photographs, the West is perceptible everywhere in the form of huge, colourful advertising banners, but the promises of the Orange Revolution, that everything would get better, have only been fulfilled for few. Through palliating nothing, transfiguring nothing, Mikhailov attempts to sensitise the view of the observer. The individual pictures and scenes create a large tableau of society that tells us more about the Ukraine and its inhabitants than any television documentary could. Only when one sees misery in a picture, does one begin to notice it in the street."