Boris Mikhailov’s Unbearable Evidence

There is no comfort in Boris Mikhailov’s Case History. Shot in Kharkiv in the late 1990s, after the Soviet Union dissolved and left most of its people with nothing but the concept of freedom and no means to use it, the series documents the bomzhi—the homeless, the dispossessed, people who fell through the gap between one system ending and another not quite beginning. Mikhailov photographed them naked, sometimes paying small amounts to pose, and the images are among the most morally difficult photographs I’ve encountered. Not because they exploit—though that argument gets made—but because they refuse abstraction. These are specific bodies, specific faces, specific damage. Case History is a ledger, and the debt it records was never paid.