Suzi Et Cetera

This photographic book introduces the comprehensive and until now unpublished series Suzi, photographed by the artist in the surroundings of his home town Charkow in the Ukraine at the beginning of the 1980s, before Glasnost and Perestroika. For 40 years, Boris Mikhailov’s photographs have documented an unofficial view of first Soviet and later Russian everyday life. In the Soviet era they presented an alternative and uncomfortable view in contrast to the officially decreed photographic backdrop of happy workers. Mikhailov’s underground reputation is based on his freestyle images shot secretly which documented the crumbling nature of a run-down system.