Exhibition: ‘Lisette Model Retrospective’ at the Albertina Museum, Vienna

Exhibition dates: 30th October, 2025 – 22nd February, 2026

Curators: Walter Moser, head of the department of photography at the Albertina, with assistant curator Nina Eisterer

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Promenade des Anglais, Nice' 1934 from the exhibition 'Lisette Model Retrospective' at The Albertina Museum, Vienna, October 2025 - February 2026

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Promenade des Anglais, Nice
1934
Gelatin silver print
50.7 x 40.4cm
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy of baudoin lebon and Avi Keitelman

 

 

From the gut

All the haughtiness of the upper-upper, lower-upper, socialites and high society in Promenade des Anglais, Nice (1934, below) versus all the “colour” and characters of Sammy’s Bar in New York, salt of the earth, dead beat party animals (1940-1944, below).

All the obsequious opulence of the women in Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York (1940-1946, below) versus all the low angle, unbuttoned bulk of a New York bag lady in Lower East Side, New York (1940-1947, below)

Model sure doesn’t pull any punches and, perchance, you know which side of the fence she sits.

Combining social realism and emotional expression Model’s street-life scenes and portraits are shot with a razor sharp mind and eye, honed with emotional insight and social conviction, promoting “a fierce attack on the bourgeoisie of the time.” These images are shot from the gut, felt in the gut! Oooof! Kapow!

This philosophical, libertarian vision is grounded in the everydayness of working people, not in men “who sit at desks as large as thrones, who gather in solemn hemicycles, in splendid and severe seats…”

Her Promenade des Anglais photographs are incisive, cutting to the marrow, evidencing a piercing, core-level truth about the nature of power, money, humility, humanity. Knowing exactly the story she wanted to tell, Model cropped her negatives in the darkroom to get the desired, constructed photographs of the elite, this promenade of the privileged. That she passed on her wisdom to Diane Arbus is only to our benefit.

Model’s photographs in this series are more biting, satirical and oblique than those of Arbus. Direct in one way (in the placement of the camera in front of the subject) but oblique in another … in the asymmetrical placement of the figures within the picture plane, in the sly acknowledgement (or not) and resentment of the camera by the subject. Conversely, her photographs of people in nightclubs, jazz performers and the socially disadvantaged are humanist photographs of the highest order, unorthodox musical compositions that sing with light, movement, and life much more so than the square, formal attributes of the Arbus.

God bless Lisette Model for her glorious irreverence and musical lyricism.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to The Albertina Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“As long as man exploits man, as long as humanity is divided into masters and servants, there will be neither normality nor peace. The reason for all the evil of our time is here. Do you see these? Severe, double-breasted, elegant men who get on and off airplanes, who run in powerful cars, who sit at desks as large as thrones, who gather in solemn hemicycles, in splendid and severe seats: these men with the faces of dogs or of saints, of hyenas or eagles, these are the masters.”


Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

Model’s libertarian philosophy is not easy to classify… it is often stuck in the approximation of street photography… but photography, when it is great, is one! and one only!… Genres only serve to sink it into the language of commerce! The lopsided shots, the deep blacks, the stellar whites… beaded with emotional uniqueness… see the human being as an end and never as a means… they invite us to think that justice is inseparable from beauty, it is a way of doing things well, like a chair-setter, a coalman, or a bricklayer… to flee from the arrogance, imitation, and contempt that accompany social codifications… what is beautiful is naturally right… because photography is not just a linguistic quest, but precisely as a linguistic quest, it is a philosophical vision… that respects no barriers or emulates the gods… it is an original, archetypal desire, that takes precedence over everything and carries it as the absolute value of beauty and justice!


Pino Bertelli. “Lisette Model. Sulla fotografia del disinganno,” on the Phocus Magazine website Nd [Online] Cited 02/02/2026. Translated from the Italian by Google Translate. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Promenade des Anglais, Nice' 1934

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Promenade des Anglais, Nice
1934
Gelatin silver print
43.2 x 35.4cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris /
Keitelman, Brussels

 

“Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934 Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits which to this day are among her most widely reproduced and widely exhibited images. With them Model declared her trademark style: Close-up, biting, satirical – almost like photographic political cartoons. In a nice bit of art history sleuthing, Thomas discovered that this series was published in the communist periodical Regards, a publication led by Ehrenburg, Gide, Gorky and Malreaux in 1935. Model, she says, never denied having published her work in Europe, but neither did she ever precisely acknowledge having done so… Thomas also relates Model’s style to the style of images published in Regards and what was being shown in small galleries – that approach, almost mocking, surely exposing, with the photographer or artist clearly separate/different if not superior from the subject – was in the air. Model perfected it, but she didn’t invent it.”

Elsa Dorfman. “Ann Thomas on Lisette Model,” on the AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY website, June 14, 2010 [Online] Cited 03/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Promenade des Anglais, Nice' 1937 from the exhibition 'Lisette Model Retrospective' at The Albertina Museum, Vienna, October 2025 - February 2026

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Promenade des Anglais, Nice
1937
Gelatin silver print
50.7 x 40.4cm
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
© Estate of Lisette Model

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Promenade des Anglais, Nice' 1937

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Promenade des Anglais, Nice
1937
Gelatin silver print
50.7 x 40.4cm
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
© Estate of Lisette Model

 

Lisette Model (1901-1983), born into a Viennese Jewish family, is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers. This ALBERTINA exhibition presents a broad retrospective covering her most important groups of works created between 1933 and 1959. Alongside iconic photographs such as Coney Island Bather and Café Metropole, the selection will also include seldom-seen works.

Model, following her emigration to New York in 1938, quickly rose to prominence with her pictures for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar showing facets of urban life: the poverty of the Lower East Side, the upper class at their leisure pursuits, and night life at bars and jazz clubs. Model went on to become an influential teacher during the McCarthy Era. The exhibition features the first-ever public presentation of the original draft of her 1979 monograph, a classic of photo book history.

Text from The Albertina Museum website

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'First Reflection, New York' 1939-1940, printed 1976-1981

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
First Reflection, New York
1939-1940, printed 1976-1981
Gelatin silver print
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Window, Bonwit Teller, New York' 1939-1940, printed 1976-1981

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Window, Bonwit Teller, New York
1939-1940, printed 1976-1981
Gelatin silver print
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Reflections, New York' 1939-1945

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Reflections, New York
1939-1945
Gelatin silver print
26.5 x 33.4cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris / Keitelman, Brussels

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Singer, Sammy's Bar, New York' c. 1940

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Singer, Sammy’s Bar, New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Lisette Model

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Couple Dancing' 1940

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Couple Dancing
1940
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Lisette Model

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Sammy’s Bar, New York' 1940-1944

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Sammy’s Bar, New York
1940-1944
Gelatin silver print
37.8 x 49cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – Permanent Loan Austrian Ludwig Foundation for Arts and Science
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris / Keitelman, Brussels

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Sammy's' 1940-1944

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Sammy’s
1940-1944
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Lisette Model

 

 

Born into a Viennese family with Jewish roots, Lisette Model (1901-1983) is considered one of the most internationally influential female photographers. The exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist in Austria to date and brings together her most important groups of works from 1933 to 1959. In addition to iconic photographs such as Coney Island Bather and Singer at the Metropole Café, the exhibition also includes lesser-known works that have never been shown before.

While Lisette Model initially pursued a musical education, it was only in France, where she lived from the mid-1920s, that she found her way to photography: in 1934, the self-taught photographer took her revealing series of portraits of rich idlers in Nice, which caused a sensation as a biting social critique in the heated political climate of the time. After Model emigrated to New York in 1938, she quickly made a name for herself in the vibrant art scene as a freelance photographer for style-setting magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. She photographed the diverse and contradictory facets of urban life: Model showed the poor population of the Lower East Side district in unsparing shots, the upper class at their pleasures in confrontational portraits and the vibrant nightlife in bars and jazz clubs in dynamic series. In the late 1940s and 1950s, she created extensive groups of works outside New York.

The photos of the west coast of the USA or Venezuela are characterised by a melancholy and gloomy mood without Model losing sight of social conditions. Due to political reprisals during the McCarthy era, Model began her second, enormously influential career as a teacher. After decades of effort, the publishing house Aperture published her first monograph in 1979. The exhibition Lisette Model presents the original design of this publication, which is now a classic among photo books, for the first time.

Lisette Model

Lisette Model (1901-1983) brought about a sudden change in photography with her spectacularly direct pictures. Her immediate, humorous, frequently confrontational, yet sometimes also empathetic style of representation revolutionised traditional documentary photography. Her pictures of street-life scenes and portraits combine social realism and emotional expression: “Shoot from the gut!” was her famous credo. This retrospective brings together Model’s most important groups of works from her nearly thirty-year career, from 1933 to 1959, including works that have never been on view before.

Lisette Model was born as Elise Amelie Felicie Stern (Seybert) into an upper class Viennese family with Jewish roots in 1901. She initially pursued a musical education and from 1919 to 1921 attended courses taught by composer Arnold Schönberg at the progressive Schwarzwald School, which had been founded by Eugenie Schwarzwald. Her contact with Schönberg proved formative for Model’s artistic work. After her father’s death, Lisette Model, together with her mother and sister, moved to France in 1926, where she discovered photography. In 1934 she shot her first extensive portrait series of wealthy idlers in Nice, which caused a furor for betraying social criticism in the heated political climate of the time.

Having emigrated to New York in 1938, Model quickly made a name for herself in the art scene as a freelance photographer for such influential magazines as Harper’s Bazaar. She photographed the contrasts of urban life: in unsparing images, Model presented the impoverished population of the Lower East Side; in scathing portraits, she depicted the upper classes indulging in their pleasures; and in a number of dynamic series, she captured the pulsating nightlife of the metropolis. In the late 1940s and 1950s she created her first series of works outside New York. Due to political reprisals during the McCarthy era, Model’s artistic work stagnated. She embarked on an influential career as a teacher, shaping an entire generation of photographers, including Larry Fink, Diane Arbus, and others.

France

In 1926, Lisette Model moved to France, where she continued her vocal training, which she was forced to discontinue abruptly due to voice problems. In 1933 she turned to photography instead. The threatening political situation in Europe made it necessary for her to learn a profession, and photography offered itself as a modern field of activity especially for women. Model’s sister Olga, a trained photographer, and the artist Rogi André provided important inspiration, including the momentous advice to photograph only what aroused her passionate interest.

The economic crisis and the rise of fascism went hand in hand with a debate among committed left-wing artists about documentary photography. The central question was to what extent photography could expose social injustices and serve as a weapon in social conflicts. It is unclear how closely Model followed these debates; in later years, she remained persistently silent on the subject. Her early photographs from Paris clearly reveal a socially critical approach. Going about her work with distinct directness, she photographed sleeping homeless people and blind beggars, whom she characterised as victims of social circumstances through their bent bodies.

In July 1934, Lisette Model used a Rolleiflex to photograph a series of portraits of wealthy idlers on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. It was synonymous with glamour and elite tourism and a popular motif at the time. Yet Model portrayed her subjects as caricatures through their facial expressions, postures, and gestures. The narrow cropping of the motifs suggests that the photographer was in close proximity to her subjects, who look condescendingly into the camera. In fact, however, Model achieved this effect in the darkroom, where she selected radically novel perspectives from the negatives.

Regards

Although Lisette Model was only at the beginning of her career, the respected communist magazine Regards published her photographs from the series Promenade des Anglais in 1935. The layout of the article juxtaposed Model’s portraits with an image of a female worker with a fishing net. The accompanying text also embeds the photographs in the ideological rhetoric of class struggle: “The Promenade des Anglais is a zoological garden where the most abominable specimens of the human species lounge in white armchairs. Their faces betray boredom, condescension, impertinent stupidity, and at times malice. These rich people, who spend most of their time dressing, adorning themselves, manicuring their nails, and applying makeup, fail to conceal the decadence and immeasurable emptiness of bourgeois thinking.”

Against the backdrop of the repressive climate of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Lisette Model would later tone down the political content of her images from Nice. Instead, she emphasised the humour and her intuitive approach to portraiture in public spaces.

New York

In October 1938, Lisette Model emigrated to New York with her husband Evsa Model, a Jewish-Russian painter. Her first series shot there reveal her great fascination with the metropolis. The work Reflection, which makes use of reflections in shop windows, merges motifs and spaces to create an enigmatic collage. For the Running Legs photographs, Model did not point her camera upwards at the skyscrapers as usual, but looked at the feet of passersby at street level. Model experienced New York’s hectic and consumer-oriented culture as ambivalent: the dark shadows in the windows of the department stores seem threatening, and the dense crowds of legs have a claustrophobic effect. In portraits of people on Fifth Avenue and Wall Street photographed from below, Model highlights the arrogance of the pedestrians rushing by.

Shortly after her arrival in New York, Lisette Model attracted the attention of several key figures in the art and media world. Her contacts with Ralph Steiner, editor of the magazine PM’s Weekly, and Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar, proved momentous. In 1941, Steiner published Model’s biting photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice under the provocative title “Why France Fell” as an explanation for the country’s defeat in World War II. Model’s first commission for Harper’s Bazaar took her to the popular leisure destination of Coney Island, where she shot her iconic photographs of a bather with an empathetic eye. As early as 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired one of Model’s pictures and continued to show her works in exhibitions in the following years.

Lower East Side

In one of her most extensive groups of works, Lisette Model focuses on the residents of the Lower East Side. Model’s attention to physical peculiarities and extremes becomes particularly apparent in it. Retrospectively defined cropping detaches the people from their spatial surroundings and emphasises the sitters’ statuesque monumentality.

Lisette Model shared her interest in the socially disadvantaged with photographers from the New York Photo League, an influential left-wing political association dedicated to socially committed photography. Becoming a member, Model actively participated in Photo League events and exhibited on its premises. And yet she distanced herself from her photography being categorised as political or social documentary. She also rejected accusations of portraying her models overly sarcastically, arguing instead for a humanist point-of-view that focuses on the strength and personality of her subjects. Emotional expression and social realism are inextricably linked in these photographs: the expressive bodies clearly display the burden of tough living conditions.

Entertainment

Similar to her photographs from France, Model also explored disparities in urban life in New York. The harsh images of the Lower East Side are juxtaposed with photographs of people indulging in leisure activities and amusing themselves at all kinds of shows. Model captured these scenes with a keen eye for human contradictions and bizarre moments: dressed-up ladies at a fashion show are just as much a part of this as participants in a dog show bearing a striking resemblance to their four-legged friends. Photographs taken in museums do not focus on the artworks intently viewed by visitors, but rather on the act of vision itself. With a few exceptions, the series Dog Show and Museum have only survived as negatives. They can now be presented here in digital form for the first time.

Nightlife

Lisette Model’s intuitive approach to photography reached its peak in her pictures of nightclubs. Using bright flashes, she snatched the celebrating guests and energetic performers from the darkness and in the subsequent post-editing of the images tilted the motifs to render the compositions more dynamic. The depiction of expressive gestures and people in moments of emotional tension recalls the body images of the early Viennese Expressionists, whom Model got to know through her contact with Arnold Schönberg. Model, who always vehemently denied the influence of other artists, acknowledged solely Schönberg’s impact on her work. His theory of the “emancipation of dissonance,” which expands on classical harmony, is echoed both in Model’s unorthodox compositions and in her caricatures.

The traumatic experience of exile left deep traces in Lisette Model’s work. Like the Lower East Side before, nightclubs were places populated by immigrants. They evoked a sense of social belonging and cultural familiarity in the artist.

West Coast

In 1946, Lisette Model accompanied her husband Evsa to San Francisco on an invitation from the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). She quickly established connections with the lively photography scene on the US West Coast, where famous photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were active. Model returned several times and in 1949 taught a course on documentary photography at the CSFA’s photography department; she continued with her teaching in New York from 1951 onward.

Model did her first major groups of works outside New York. The photographs of visitors to the opera of San Francisco rank among her most striking portraits and illustrate her strategy of bringing out individual characters by exaggerating physical peculiarities.

In 1949 an assignment for the Ladies Home Journal took Lisette Model to Reno, Nevada. She photographed women staying at so-called “divorce ranches,” waiting for their divorces to be finalised. Thanks to more liberal laws, divorce was possible in Nevada after a waiting period of just a few weeks – compared to the patriarchal rules of other states, this was an uncomplicated way for women in particular to separate from their spouses. Lisette Model’s sympathy for her sitters becomes palpable. Unlike the pictures taken in San Francisco, these portraits are less expressive, but more melancholic instead.

Venezuela

In the 1950s, in the wake of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquired into Lisette Model’s activities. Neighbours and even her grocer were questioned about the artist. In February 1954 two FBI agents finally interrogated Lisette Model and accused her of alleged membership in the communist party and of her actual affiliation with the Photo League, which had already disbanded in 1951 due to political pressure. The agents were unable to prove any wrongdoing on Model’s part, but classified her as uncooperative and recommended that she be placed on the security watch list. As a result of these accusations, Model lost some of her most important clients and was forced to supplement her income by working as a teacher.

Plagued by financial difficulties, she travelled to Caracas in 1954, accepting an invitation extended by the Venezuelan government. By then, Venezuela had been under the presidency of Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez for two years – a military officer and dictator who modernised Caracas and exploited the country’s rich oil reserves. In photographs that were unusual for her in terms of motif and style, Model captured the technical infrastructure for oil production around Lake Maracaibo. Because of their gloomy atmosphere, the images were unsuitable for use in advertising and propaganda. Unsettled by the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the photographer often found it difficult to relate to her surroundings.

Jazz

As a result of the reprisals during the McCarthy era, Lisette Model photographed significantly less in the 1950s than in the promising decades before. One exception were the photographs she took during a horserace in New York in 1956, where she directed her attention at the audience instead of the competition. Her preoccupation with the subject of jazz was most intense. It is Model’s largest body of work, which developed from her photographs of New York nightclubs in the 1940s. Model was one of the few women to photograph jazz events such as the Newport Jazz Festival or concerts of the Lenox School of Jazz at the Berkshire Music Barn in Massachusetts. Highly musical herself, Model knew how to use her straightforward approach to convey the passion and intensity of the musicians’ playing as an immediate experience. No musician was photographed by her as often as Billie Holiday. One of Lisette Model’s last pictures, taken in 1959, shows the singer lying in her coffin.

In the 1950s, Model planned to publish her jazz photographs. It would have been the first monographic jazz book in history, but the project failed when her former client at Harper’s Bazaar discredited Model as a “troublemaker” and, due to her “political unreliability,” dissuaded potential financial backers.

Starting in the 1970s, Lisette Model was rediscovered in exhibitions and interviews. After years of effort, the first monograph on her work, with an introduction by Berenice Abbott, came out in 1979 with the renowned publisher Aperture. It is now considered an incunabulum within the photo book genre. The Albertina owns the hitherto unpublished dummy with original prints. Originally, the book was to be printed with a comprehensive biography of the artist penned by author Phillip Lopate. Dissatisfied with the text, Model had the manuscript withdrawn and commented on it with scathing remarks: “I thought an introduction was to be written – not that I was to be put on trial,” she noted down on the title page.

Model’s behaviour was indicative of the protective shield she had built around her private life as a result of her threatening encounter with the paranoia of the McCarthy era. In her public statements and interviews she obscured facts and details of her biography. She resisted simplistic interpretations of her work, but also concealed and marginalised references to politically explosive works, such as the publication of her photographs from Nice in the communist publication Regards in the mid-1930s.

Press release from The Albertina Museum

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Coney Island Bather, New York' 1939-1941

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Coney Island Bather, New York
1939-1941
Gelatin silver print
49.5 × 39.3cm
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
©️ Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy of baudoin lebon and Avi Keitelman

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York' 1940-1946

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York
1940-1946
Gelatin silver print
39.3 x 49.2 cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, Permanent Loan Austrian Ludwig Foundation for Arts and Science
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris / Keitelman, Brussels

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Lower East Side, New York' 1940-1947

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Lower East Side, New York
1940-1947
34.6 × 27.1cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris / Keitelman, Brussels

 

Lisette Model (1901-1983) 'Albert-Alberta, Hubert's 42nd St Flea Circus, New York' 1945

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Albert-Alberta, Hubert’s Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York
1945, printed 1980s
Gelatin silver print
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Female impersonator' c. 1945

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Female impersonator
c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Opera, San Francisco' 1949

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Opera, San Francisco
1949
Gelatin silver print
34 × 26.6cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris / Keitelman, Brussels

 

Lisette Model (American, born Austria 1901-1983) 'Opera, San Francisco' 1949

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Opera, San Francisco
1949
Gelatin silver print
© The Lisette Model Foundation

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)

Lisette Model (Vienna, 1901 – New York, 1983) was one of the main practitioners of North American direct photography. Born into a Jewish bourgeois family in Vienna, she studied piano and singing with Arnold Schönberg. In 1926 she moved to Paris where she became interested in painting and photography. Due to the oncoming war in Europe and growing anti-Semitism spreading throughout the continent, Model moved to New York in 1938 and began to work as a photographer for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar under the guidance of Alexey Brodovitch. She became a member of the Photo League.

Free of any sort of indoctrination, Model’s work stands out for her use of direct portraiture and for focusing on the peculiarities of the people she portrayed. Her images are full of low-angle shots, radical framings, and powerful black and white contrasts, making them greatly expressive. Some of her most renowned series – Promenade des Anglais, Reflections, and Running Legs – were produced in the French Côte d’Azur and in New York.

At the end of her career Model worked with Gerhard Sander, grandson of the photographer August Sander, who became her art dealer and lab assistant. Her work as an instructor was also notable. She began teaching in 1949 at the California School of Fine Arts and continued to teach throughout her life at other institutions such as the New School for Social Research. Her role as a professor would leave a mark on some of the most important photographers of the following generation, such as Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, and Peter Hujar, to name a few.

Text from the Fundacion MAPFRE website

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Singer at the Metropole Café, New York' 1946

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Singer at the Metropole Café, New York
1946
Gelatin silver print
49.6 x 39.8 cm
The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Lebon, Paris /
Keitelman, Brussels

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Woman with Veil, San Francisco' 1949

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Woman with Veil, San Francisco
1949
Gelatin silver print
49.8 x 10.1 cm
Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy of baudoin lebon and Avi Keitelman

 

Closeness that does not comfort

Model’s photographs are close. Uncomfortably close. Faces, bodies, gestures fill the frame, often to the limit of what is bearable. The famous tight cropping, often decided only in the darkroom, frees the people from their surroundings and confronts the viewer with full presence. There is no escaping. No decorative surroundings.

And yet there is no voyeurism. No mockery. Despite all the harshness, these images carry a form of respect, often with a good dose of humor or, depending on the subject, social criticism. You sense that someone is looking here, not looking down. There is tension hanging in the air – between ruthlessness and empathy – and it keeps the work relevant to this day.

Anonymous. “Zeit hinzusehen: Lisette Model in der Albertina,” on the ViennaCultgram website Nd [online] Cited 02/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Ollie McLaughlin, Hotel Viking, Newport Jazz Festival, Rhode Island' 1956

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Ollie McLaughlin, Hotel Viking, Newport Jazz Festival, Rhode Island
1956
Gelatin silver print
27.5 × 34.9cm
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy of baudoin lebon and Avi Keitelman

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Ella Fitzgerald' 1954

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Ella Fitzgerald
1954
Gelatin silver print

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Dizzy Gillespie, New York Jazz Festival' 1956

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Dizzy Gillespie, New York Jazz Festival
1956
Gelatin silver print

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Bud Powell, New York Jazz Festival' 1957

 

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Bud Powell, New York Jazz Festival
1957
Gelatin silver print

 

 

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Exhibition: ‘Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 10th October, 2025 – 22nd February, 2026

Poland 1978-1990

Co-curators: Clare Grafik and Karol Hordziej

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

 

Photo-gene(ic)

I profoundly admire the work of Polish social documentary photographer Zofia Rydet.

There are no ‘look at me I’m the photographer’ flourishes to her photographs, no egotistical excess, just a version of reality pictured through direct flash photography – rural Polish life, interiors and ancestors, families and marriages, portraits of younger self, older self and the transience of time.

Here lives religion, wallpaper, stencils pasted directly onto thick, rough hewn walls, patterned, fabrics, youth and old age. A boy in his flat with a racing helmet and a poster of Brazilian Formula 1 driver Carlos Reutemann on the wall, bottles of gin and brandy above the door; a young girl, wall plastered with posters of Sting and the band The Police; a woman sitting on a chair, bare feet, rickety bed to left, portraits of wedding day and husband and life behind her. Ancient and modern.

Like August Sander’s unfinished magnum opus People of the 20th Century in which the photographer attempted “to produce a definitive atlas of the German people over the course of his lifetime” (Getty), Zofia Rydet’s archive, record, document, is “an unfinished atlas of memory” of a Polish way of life that is fast disappearing. Her stories of Polish humanity with their huts and habitations speaks to the essential nature, the rootedness, of a people and culture.

The souls are not photogenic, but through Rydet’s direct, engaging process they become photo-gene(ic), archetypes and representatives of ancestors past, present and future which together form the genetic make-up of Polish society. Rydet tells their stories with empathy and compassion, the artist “captivated by something worth preserving – especially the wonderful human stories I hear during these visits.”

These photographs hold the viewers attention because they mean something in this transient world of facile images. As Youssra Manlaykhaf cogently observes,

“Today, in an age when we document ourselves endlessly but often forget what those images mean, Rydet’s work feels newly vital. Her archive is a reminder that photography can still be an act of devotion, a way of saying I see you, and you matter. Rydet didn’t just photograph people; she photographed the fragile dignity of being human. And in doing so, she built a record not just for Poland, but for all of us; an unfinished atlas of memory, tender and eternal.”1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Youssra Manlaykhaf. “The Unfinished Archive,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/202. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research


Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“I knock on the door, I say ‘hello’, and I shake hands.”


“Even if they don’t publish it… this will remain, not art perhaps, but a document of the times.”


“For me, photography is not just a visual image, but above all, a language I’d like to speak to ordinary people, not great artists. Photography’s greatest value lies in its informative role, its content – not in its transient artistic endeavours. The more my “Record” grows, the more I believe it will have lasting value. I’m convinced I’m on the right track – I still have so many plans, just not enough life ahead of me…”


“I know some people think I’m hypocritical, self-serving, telling these people they’re beautiful. But I truly see something interesting, beautiful in every person, and I’m captivated by something worth preserving – especially the wonderful human stories I hear during these visits. Each person is a story in itself, some very interesting, some instructive, sometimes moving…”


Zofia Ryde

 

 

 

Interview with the Zofia Rydet Foundation | The Photographers’ Gallery

Delve into the life and work of the warmly remembered Polish social documentarian, Zofia Rydet in an interview with the Zofia Rydet Foundation and Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions, The Photographers’ Gallery.

Sociological Record by Zofia Rydet is a sweepingly comprehensive documentary portrait of Polish domestic life which spans decades, eras, regions and cultures.

 

 

Head curator and art historian Karolina Ziębińska explorie the work and legacy of Zofia Rydet (1911-1997), one of Poland’s most significant post-war photographers.

Best known for her lifelong project The Sociological Record (1978-1990), Rydet sought to systematically document the interiors and inhabitants of Polish homes, creating a vast visual archive of everyday life during a time of profound social and political transformation.

In this talk, Ziębińska introduce Rydet’s distinctive approach to photography, situating her practice within the shifting cultural, historical and ideological contexts of 20th-century Poland. It also spotlights other areas of Rydet’s practice and is an opportunity to consider how Rydet’s work resonates within broader conversations about identity, memory and the role of the photograph as social document.

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Zofia Rydet Sociological Record' at The Photographers' Gallery, London

 

Installation view of the exhibition Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

 

 

From 1978, when she was 67, Zofia Rydet (1911-1997) set out to photograph the inside of every Polish household. She would approach a home unannounced, knock, and warmly introduce herself and ask the people living there if they would like to take part in her project.

Rydet was always on the road, with a camera in her hand. For nearly three decades, she photographed people in their homes, still lives, building exteriors and landscapes. She also returned to the same houses several years after she first visited to document the transformation of rural Poland. The result – Sociological Record – is a monumental project and one of the most important achievements in 20th century Polish photography.

Rydet used photography to express everyday stories and capture the essence of what it meant to be human. Despite the project’s epic scope, the individual portraits often feel intimate and revealing. Her careful and considered practice spans decades and she worked on the project until her death in 1997.

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

 

Rydet is best known for The Sociological Record – an extraordinary lifelong project documenting thousands of domestic interiors and portraits across Poland from the late 1970s onwards. Her work captured the nuances of everyday life during a time of rapid social and political change, revealing how identity, class and belonging were expressed within the home. For me, Rydet’s photographs are a commentary on a particular period in time, a transition from communism to capitalism, a shift from rural to the urban and a way of seeing that span the personal and the collective. …

I discussed Sociological Record with my mum who also visited the exhibition. We were both deeply moved by the large vinyl image of a straw house surrounded by smaller photographs of other homes. It is heartwarming to see such intimate, everyday experiences documented and acknowledged in the Gallery – moments that resonate deeply with many Polish people living in the UK. …

The recurring presence of John Paul II in Rydet’s work also struck a familiar chord; his image continues to appear in Polish households both in the UK and in Poland, carrying with it layers of cultural memory, belonging, but also conflict. Some of Rydet’s portraits – with their lace curtains, tablecloths, patterned rugs and carefully arranged family photographs – reminded me of our own home in Poland. They share an aesthetic and emotional language that feels instantly recognisable: the way ancestors’ portraits watch quietly from the walls, the mix of pride and modesty in how people present their space. To see this visual culture acknowledged and valued within a major British art institution feels both affirming and long awaited – a recognition of a Polish history that has long existed yet has rarely been seen.

Zula Rabikowska. “Zula Rabikowska responds to Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 06/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

 

The Unfinished Archive

Delve into the life and work of the warmly remembered Polish social documentarian, Zofia Rydet

By the time Zofia Rydet began her greatest work, she was already in her sixties, an age when most photographers might be reflecting on what they’ve accomplished, not setting out to capture an entire nation. Yet that’s exactly what she did. From the late 1970s until a few years before the end of her life, Rydet roamed through towns and villages across Poland, camera in hand, knocking on doors and asking to come inside. 

Her project, Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny), became one of the most extraordinary photographic archives of the twentieth century: over 20,000 black-and-white portraits, most taken inside a person’s home. The format rarely changed. Her subjects stand in their living rooms, surrounded by furniture, family photos, crucifixes, embroidery, clocks and wallpaper that tells as much of a story as their faces do. Every image is composed with the same direct flash, the same square frame, and the same feeling that time has briefly stood still. 

At first glance, Rydet’s portraits might seem uniform, almost bureaucratic in their repetition. But look longer, and the sameness dissolves. You begin to notice the delicate individuality in each frame: the proud tilt of a chin, a mismatched chair, a child’s toy tucked behind an armchair. Each photograph becomes a world of its own.

Rydet was born in 1911 in Stanisławów, a city that no longer exists as it once did. Over her lifetime, Poland’s borders shifted, wars came and went, and entire ways of life vanished. Perhaps that’s why she photographed with such urgency. She once said she wanted to “save people from disappearing,” and in Sociological Record, that impulse becomes visible. Her archive reads like a collective portrait of Poland on the brink of transformation, the last breaths of a rural and domestic culture before modernity swept through. “I can already see the difference now, three or four years later – the huts are disappearing, being rebuilt… I miss the houses near Warsaw, but I’m afraid to go there…” 

Before she began this monumental project, Rydet had already spent two decades photographing daily life: children playing in the streets, fishermen, women at markets. Her early images are tender and human, often filled with humour. But in the late 1970s, she found her true calling. Carrying her medium-format camera and a small flash, she entered the homes of strangers, sometimes by invitation, sometimes by bold insistence, and created what she saw as a kind of “photographic sociology.”

What’s remarkable is that Rydet’s approach, while systematic, never feels cold. Her use of flash flattens space so that every detail, faces, furniture, wallpaper and light becomes equally significant. It’s as if she believed that the soul of a person might just as easily reside in the pattern of a curtain as in their expression.

Her images speak not only of individuals but of collective identity: Polish Catholic iconography, working-class aspiration, domestic pride. And beneath it all, the quiet ache of time passing. In one photo, a couple stands shoulder to shoulder beneath their wedding portrait, two images separated by decades, yet bound by the same gaze. In another, a young boy stares directly at the camera, his future still unwritten.

Rydet continued photographing well into the 1980s, often assisted by younger artists who recognised the importance of what she was building. She never considered the project finished; how could she? The very premise, recording the human condition through its domestic spaces, was infinite by nature. When she died in 1997, she left behind a sprawling, incomplete monument to ordinary lives.

Today, in an age when we document ourselves endlessly but often forget what those images mean, Rydet’s work feels newly vital. Her archive is a reminder that photography can still be an act of devotion, a way of saying I see you, and you matter. Rydet didn’t just photograph people; she photographed the fragile dignity of being human. And in doing so, she built a record not just for Poland, but for all of us; an unfinished atlas of memory, tender and eternal.

Youssra Manlaykhaf. “The Unfinished Archive,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/202. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997) From 'Sociological Record' 1978-1990

 

Zofia Rydet (Polish, 1911-1997)
From Sociological Record
1978-1990
© Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation

 

 

Opening this October at The Photographers’ Gallery, as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, Sociological Record is a landmark photographic project undertaken by Polish photographer Zofia Rydet. The series is a comprehensive documentary portrait of Polish domestic life which spans decades, eras, regions and cultures.

Starting in 1978, aged 67 years old, Zofia Rydet (1911-1997) set out on a mammoth task to photograph the inside of ‘every’ Polish household. Motivated by a desire to capture the ordinary, unsung populations, particularly of the countryside – but also covering towns and cities – Rydet would become increasingly obsessed with her mission to record the cultures and people that she sought out.

Rydet cut an unlikely figure on her field trips to different regions, a diminutive woman travelling by bus or with the help of friends who could drive her. Approaching households unannounced, she would knock and warmly introduce herself, asking those living there if they would like to take part in her project. Using a newly acquired wide angle lens and flash, Rydet was able to capture often darkened interiors of homes and their inhabitants in great detail. Asking her sitters not to smile and look straight ahead into the camera lens, her subjects are posed in their homes, rich in personal histories.

As the series progressed, Rydet would identify different categories within the Sociological Record such as ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Professions’, ‘The Ill’, ‘Road Signs’, ‘Windows’, ‘Houses’ and ‘Televisions’. She would also come to identify more philosophical themes such as ‘Presence’ – noting the omniscience of the Polish Pope John Paul II’s image (inaugurated the same year Rydet started the Record in 1978) within Polish households. Others included ‘The Myth of Photography’ focusing on the central position and significance of family photographs within the home, such as traditional, hand-painted studio photographs of married couples in homes with little or no other decoration.

Through the cumulative interactions with her sitters, sometimes returning to households more than once over time, Rydet identified a change in her own personal and artistic journey and the role photography played within it. Creating over 20,000 images, many of which by the end of the project were never printed – Sociological Record is a monumental project and one of the most important achievements in 20th century Polish photography.

Rydet said of her hopes for the work: “Even if they don’t publish it… this will remain, not art perhaps, but a document of the times.” Rydet continued working on the Record until 1990, seven years before she died aged 86 years old.

This is the first substantial exhibition of Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record in the UK. It focuses on the small proportion of rare prints she made from the series in her home darkroom, including the significant ‘People in Interiors’ works, and other sub-series such as ‘Women on Doorsteps’ and ‘Presence’. It will also feature ephemera from Rydet’s archives and original publications. Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki’s 1989 documentary film about Rydet, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’, as well as Polish photographer Anna Beata Bohdziewicz’s documentary portraits of Rydet at work will also be on show.

Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025. It is produced by The Photographers’’’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage), Poland, and the Zofia Rydet Foundation.

A new English catalogue will accompany the exhibition featuring texts by Zofia Rydet and 100 images from the Sociological Record series. Edited by co-curators of the exhibition, Clare Grafik and Karol Hordziej, image edit with the collaboration of Wojciech Nowicki. Produced by Lola Paprocki and designed by Brian Kanagaki / Kanagaki Studio. Co-published by The Photographers’ Gallery and Palm* Studios, with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

About Zofia Rydet

Zofia Rydet was born in 1911 in Stanisławów, Galicia – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Poland, now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. The daughter of a Polish lawyer and judge who served the rural populations of the area, her first photographs were in the regions of south-eastern Polish borderlands.

Following the brutal and tumultuous occupation of Nazi Germany in World War II and the region’s absorption into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, her family fled into the newly defined borders of Poland at the end of the war to Rabka and then Bytom in Upper Silesia. There she would focus on her passion for photography, as one of the few women members of the Gliwice Photography Society, which she joined in 1954. She met other avant-garde photographers, became a photography teacher and began sending her photographs to international and national competitions.

Her artistic career developed through many distinct but overlapping phases which included the seminal series and photobook Little Man (Mały Człowiek), which drew on her many photographs of children taken during her national and international travels, highlighting humanist approaches to documentary photography and emphasising the complexities and challenges of childhood. Her long-standing surrealist collage series The World of Feelings and Imagination (Świat uczuć i wyobraźni) also marked an important expressive phase in her creative practice. Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny) would become her final and largest artistic project.

About Adam Mickiewicz Institute

The Adam Mickiewicz Institute (AMI) brings Polish culture to people around the world. Being a state institution, it creates lasting interest in Polish culture and art through strengthening the presence of Polish artists on the global stage. It initiates innovative projects, supports international cooperation and cultural exchanges. It promotes the work of both established and promising artists, showing the diversity and richness of our culture. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is also responsible for the Culture.pl website, a comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish culture. For more information please visit: www.iam.pl.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery

 

Portrait of Zofia Rydet Nd

 

Portrait of Zofia Rydet Nd

 

Zofia Rydet and photographer friends Nd

 

Zofia Rydet and photographer friends Nd

 

Zofia Rydet with camera and subjects Nd

 

Zofia Rydet with camera and subjects Nd

 

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW

Opening hours:
Mon – Wed: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday – Friday: 10.00 – 20.00
Saturday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00

The Photographers’ Gallery website

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Photographic series: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Metropolis’ 2025-2026

February 2026

 

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'No. 1 Brewery B' 2026 from the series 'Metropolis'

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
No. 1 Brewery B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

 

This is a selection of images from the new series. Please see the whole series on my website.

The base images for this series of work come from a book on the history of St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin published in 1931. These images have then been reflected, distorted, overlapped and filters have been used to produce the desired feeling. Each image has a different number of variations depending on this feeling. The 75 images in the series are sequenced as in the book.

The influences on the work were the architecture in Fritz Lang’s 1937 film Metropolis; the surrealist photography of Dora Maar notably her image Le Simulateur (The Pretender) 1936; the modernist photographs of factory machines by artists such as Jakob Tuggener and Albert Renger-Patzsch; and the prisons of Piranesi’s etchings published in Carceri d’invenzione, often translated as Imaginary Prisons, c. 1745 to 1750.

© Marcus Bunyan


Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image.
Please view the work on a large computer screen if possible.
Please see the whole series on my website.
Many thankx to Elizabeth Gertsakis for her invaluable help.

 

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'No. 2 Brewery' 2026  from the series 'Metropolis'

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
No. 2 Brewery
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Boiler House B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Boiler House B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Old Engine A' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Old Engine A
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Electric Power Station A'
2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Electric Power Station A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Compressor Machines A' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Compressor Machines A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Refrigerating Plant A' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Refrigerating Plant A
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Robert St. Malt Store – Exterior A' 2026
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Robert St. Malt Store – Exterior B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Robert St. Malt Store – Exterior A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Robert St. Malt Store – Interior A' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Robert St. Malt Store – Interior A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Loading Malt Wagons B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Loading Malt Wagons D' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Loading Malt Wagons B, D
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Cooke's Lane Malt House A' 2026
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Cooke's Lane Malt House C' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Cooke’s Lane Malt House A-C
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Barley in Process of Being Malted' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Barley in Process of Being Malted
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Malt Train Outside No. 2 Brewery B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Malt Train Outside No. 2 Brewery B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Hops in Store A' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Hops in Store C' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Hops in Store A-C
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Loading Hop Wagons A'
2026
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Loading Hop Wagons B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Loading Hop Wagons A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Regulating Mash Temperatures B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Regulating Mash Temperatures B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Copper Stage A' 2026
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Copper Stage B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Copper Stage A-C
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'"Striking Off" a Copper'
2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
“Striking Off” a Copper
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'A Corner of No. 11 Vat House A' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
A Corner of No. 11 Vat House A
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Vat House – Another View B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Vat House – Another View C' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Vat House – Another View A-C
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Cask Making Shop – Blazing A' 2026
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Cask Making Shop – Blazing B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Cask Making Shop – Blazing A-C
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Cask Magazine A'
2026 from the series 'Metropolis'

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Cask Magazine A-C
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Cooperage Yard – Another View B' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Cooperage Yard – Another View F' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Cooperage Yard A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Cask Cleansing Shed A'
2026 from the series 'Metropolis'

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Cask Cleansing Shed A-D
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Racking Room, Showing Casks being Filled' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Racking Room, Showing Casks being Filled
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Loading Railway Wagons' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Loading Railway Wagons
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Low Platform Vehicle B'
2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Low Platform Vehicle A-B
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Some of the Delivery Fleet About to Start' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Some of the Delivery Fleet About to Start
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
'Loading Wharf on River Liffey C' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Loading Wharf on River Liffey D' 2026

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Loading Wharf on River Liffey C-D
2026
from the series Metropolis

 

 

Marcus Bunyan website

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Exhibition: ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 10th October, 2025 – 22nd February, 2026

Curators: Laurie Hurwitz and Shoair Mavlian in collaboration with Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary' at The Photographers' Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series 'Luriki' (1971-1985) and 'Sots Art' (c. 1975-1986); and at right, a photograph from the series 'National Hero' (1991)

 

Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Luriki (1971-1985, below) and Sots Art (c. 1975-1986, below); and at right, a photograph from the series National Hero (1991, below)

 

 

“The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not.”

From the film Perfect Days, 2023 directed by Wim Wenders

 

I love this man’s work. I feel very connected to his worlds. His constructed discontinuities. His ruptures, compressions, ambiguities. His social codifications of rich, poor, haves and have nots, and, as someone said, his portrayal of “the overlooked, the uncomfortable, and the unabashedly human.”

“Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large.”1

“By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.”2

Experimental, conceptual, staged, performative, his photographs appeal to my subversive nature, prodding as they do at the status quo. His “rebellious visual language” takes us on a journey – his journey, Ukraine’s journey – “a journey through time, loss, and transformation.”

I wrote of his work in an earlier posting on this exhibition when it was at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris:

“Mikhailov’s photographs are emotionally powerful, politically astute and uncannily effective conversations with the world… about subjects that should matter to all of us: war, destitution, poverty, oppression, and the power of an authoritarian state to control the thoughts and actions of human beings under its control. They are about the freedom of individual people to live their lives as they choose; and they are about the freedom of a group of people which form a country to not be subjugated under the rule of another country to which they are historically linked.

His photographs are about choice and difference, they are about life.

They perform a task, that is, they bring into consciousness … the ground on which we stand together, against oppression, for freedom. Of course, no country is without its problems, its historical traumas, prejudices and corruption but the alternative is being ruled over without a choice, which is totally unacceptable.

Against the “failed promises of both communism and capitalism” and the “economic history that is written on the flesh” of the poor, Boris Mikhaïlov’s Ukrainian diary documents day after day the dis-ease and fragility, but also resilience, of his subjects and the world in which they live. He uses his art as a visual tool for cultural resistance. And the thing about his images is: you remember them. They are unlike so much bland, conceptual contemporary photography because these are powerful, emotional images. In their being, in their presence, they resonate within you.”

In this earlier posting you will find a longer text that I wrote, descriptions of the each of the artist’s series and more images. I hope you can view the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

 1/ Extract from Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” on the MOKSOP website, 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026

2/ Kateryna Filyuk. “Recalcitrant Diarist of the Everyday,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/2026


Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“I chose to focus on ordinary, everyday scenes and the search for formal solutions to translate this mundaneness into photography.”


Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino. Köln: König, 2011, p. 230

 

“Central themes – heroism, failure, power, the body, identity, absurdity, ideology – recur throughout, not as definitive conclusions but as open-ended provocations that invite sustained contemplation. In this way, the exhibition operates as both a temporal sequence and a constellation of moments – fragmented yet interconnected – that collectively evoke the complexity, contradictions, and richness of Mikhailov’s visionary practice.”


Laurie Hurwitz curator

 

“The explicit, dramatic and total power of the absolute monarch had given place to what Michel Foucault has called a diffuse and pervasive ‘microphysics of power’, operating unremarked in the smallest duties and gestures of everyday life. The seat of this capillary power was a new ‘technology’: that constellation of institutions – including the hospital, the asylum, the school, the prison, the police force – whose disciplinary methods and techniques of regulated examination produced, trained and positioned a hierarchy of docile social subjects in the form required by the capitalist division of labour for the orderly conduct of social and economic life.”


John Tagg. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993

 

From the beginning, we conceived two video works as conceptual bookends. At the entrance, Yesterday’s Sandwich – a seminal project from the late 1960s – presents a hallucinatory sequence of double exposures set to music by Pink Floyd. These psychedelic, surreal images, rejecting Soviet visual orthodoxy, open up a new, rebellious visual language. At the exit, Temptation of Death (2019) offers a quieter, meditative counterpoint. Combining images from a crematorium in Ukraine with intimate portraits and cityscapes, it evokes the myth of Charon, ferryman of the dead, and a journey through time, loss, and transformation. Together, these two works, created nearly fifty years apart, frame the exhibition with a meditation on mortality, reinvention, and the fragile persistence of life.


Lucile Brizard. “”Where are we now?”: An Exclusive Interview with Photographer Boris Mikhailov on Ukraine’s Past and Present,” on the United 24 Media website, October 29, 2015 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026

 

 

Luriki, 1971-1985

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Luriki' (Coloured Soviet Portrait) 1971-1985

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portrait)
1971-1985
Hand-coloured gelatin silver print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Luriki' (Coloured Soviet Portrait) 1971-1985

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portrait)
1971-1985
Hand-coloured gelatin silver print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Sots Art, 1975-1986

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Sots Art' 1982-1983

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Sots Art
1982-1983
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

National Hero, 1992

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'National Hero' 1991

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series National Hero
1991
Chromogenic print
120 x 81cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary' at The Photographers' Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series 'Salt Lake' (1986); at at right in the background, photographs from his series 'I am not I' (1992)

 

Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Salt Lake (1986, below); at at right in the background, photographs from his series I am not I (1992, below)

 

Salt Lake, 1986

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Salt Lake' 1986

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Salt Lake
1986
Chromogenic print toned sepia
75.5 x 104.5cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

I Am Not I, 1992

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'I am not I' 1992

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series I am not I
1992
Sepia silver print
30 x 20cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

 

A major retrospective of work by influential Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv, Ukraine).

Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov, one of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe. Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work. 

Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering practice, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of his most important series, up to his more recent projects. Viewed today, against the backdrop of current events and ongoing war in Ukraine, Mikhailov’s work is all the more poignant and enlightening.

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

 

Red, 1965-1978

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Red' 1968-1975

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Red
1968-1975
Digital chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

 

“The word ‘red’ in Russian contains the root of the word for beauty. It also means the Revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associates red with Communism. Maybe that’s enough. But few people know that red suffused all our lives, at all levels.”


Boris Mikhailov

 

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Red' 1968-1975

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Red
1968-1975
Digital chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Red' 1968-1975

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Red
1968-1975
Digital chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1960s-1970s

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Yesterday's Sandwich' 1960s-1970s

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1960s-1970s
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Yesterday's Sandwich' 1960s-1970s

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1966-1968
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Yesterday's Sandwich' 1960s-1970s

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1966-1968
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Yesterday's Sandwich' 1966-1968

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1966-1968
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Yesterday's Sandwich' 1966-1968

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1960s-1970s
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Yesterday's Sandwich' 1960s-1970s

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1966-1968
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

 

Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv). One of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.

Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering work, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of life in the Ukraine and the tumultuous changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

From early underground works and images of everyday life in Kharkiv, to his self-depreciating self-portraits which mock traditional Soviet masculine stereotypes, Mikhailov creates an ambiguous, fragmented view of a world in constant flux. His photographs contradict the onesideness of Soviet ideology, especially during the time when photography was heavily controlled and censored in the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including Yesterday’s Sandwich, I am not I, Salt Lake, Red, Sots Art, Luriki, Case History and Theatre of War.

Self-taught and ‘somewhat careless’ (in his words), Yesterday’s Sandwich (1960s-1970s), one of his most important series, began as an accident when a handful of slides stuck together. He was fascinated by the result and continued to randomly layer slides, creating new combinations which ‘reflected the dualism and contradictions of Soviet Society’.

Mikhailov created ‘bad photography’ as a way to undermine official Soviet aesthetics, as introduced in the series Black Archive (1968-1979). Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were an artistic device that Mikhailov described as ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’.

The series Red (1965-1978) bridges documentary photography and conceptual art – over 70 images taken in the late 1960s and 1970s highlighting the colour red in everyday objects and scenes. His documenting of red reveals the extent to which communist ideology saturated daily life.

Together his uncompromising, subversive work is a powerful photographic narrative on Ukraine’s contemporary history.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.

About Boris Mikhailov

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. With access to a camera, he took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene. His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series Case History, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery

 

Series of Four, early 1980s

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938) From the series 'Series of four' 1982-1983

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Series of four
1982-1983
Silver gelatin print, unique copy
From a 20-part series
Each 18 x 23.80cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

At Dusk, 1993

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'At Dusk' 1993

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series At Dusk
1993
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'At Dusk' 1993

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series At Dusk
1993
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Recalcitrant Diarist of the Everyday

Curator and researcher, Kateryna Filyuk, explores the intimate diaristic qualities of Boris Mikhailov’s subversive body of work.

Even before seeing Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, I found myself thinking about its title. The idea of a diary fits naturally with Mikhailov’s work: instead of creating a grand, official narrative inherent to Soviet photography, he developed an intimate and fragmented way of seeing. The term Ukrainian, however, is less straightforward. Some of his more recent bodies of work that directly address Ukrainian events: Parliament  (2015-17); and Temptation of Death  (2014-19), which adopts the Kyiv Crematorium as its binding motif, are not included in the exhibition.

Mikhailov began challenging Soviet photographic norms as early as the mid-1960s, working with a circle of like-minded friends. At the time, photographing “for no reason” could be equated with spying; showing Soviet life as anything less than ideal was seen as an attack on communist values; and photographing the naked body could result in prison. Mikhailov did all of this and more. He turned his camera toward mundane subjects, mixed genres freely and questioned photography’s claim to present an ultimate truth. By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.  

Art historian Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk reflects on whether Ukrainian is an appropriate label for the Kharkiv School of Photography, of which Mikhailov is a founding figure. She writes that ”the school’s activities stretch between two heterogeneous historical realities: on the one hand, Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’ and the perestroika fatal to the USSR, and on the other, the economically brutal birth of the Ukrainian state.” [2] This dramatic time span, during which Ukrainians experienced long-awaited yet destabilising transformation, offers a more fitting temporality for understanding Mikhailov’s work in Ukrainian Diary. Geographically, most of his projects take place in what was first Soviet Ukraine and later became independent Ukraine. Temporally, however, they exist within a landscape marked by ruptures, discontinuities, and perpetual new beginnings.

In the preface to one of his most audacious works, Case History  (1997-98), Mikhailov reflects on the lack of a photographic record documenting complex historical shifts in Ukraine: ”I was aware that I was not allowed to let it happen once again that some periods of life would be erased.” [3] After returning to Kharkiv from a year in Berlin, he was struck by the stark divide between the newly rich and the newly poor, a process already in full swing. Yet his aim in photographing the homeless did not follow the classic documentary model, such as the USA Farm Security Administration’s work, which sought to highlight a social problem and prompt state intervention. Instead, by showing the everyday lives of those most affected by the collapse, Mikhailov “directly assaults the onlookers’ sensitivity” [4] and “transgresses the acceptable limits of representation,” [5] His goal was not to provoke pity or shock though.

Rather, Mikhailov asserts something more fundamental: the individual’s right to exist and express themselves beyond convention. Through his unwavering attention to ordinary lives, he bears witness to massive transformations unfolding beyond any single person’s control. Ukrainian Diary, then, is not simply a national label or a chronological record. It is a testament to how one artist has persistently documented a world defined by instability, reinvention, and the fragile, but enduring presence, of everyday life.

Kateryna Filyuk

Kateryna Filyuk is a curator and researcher, who holds PhD from the University of Palermo. In 2017-2021 she served as a chief curator at Izolyatsia., a Platform for cultural initiatives in Kyiv. Before joining Izolyatsia, she was co-curator of the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2017). The co-founder of the publishing house 89books in Palermo, she has participated in curatorial programmes at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, 2017), De Appel (Amsterdam, 2015-16), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2014) and the Gwangju Biennale (2012). In 2023 Filyuk was a visiting PhD student at the Central European University (Vienna) and in 2024 a visiting researcher at FOTOHOF Archiv (Salzburg) and the Predoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome). Currently she develops a two-year scholarly initiative – the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Max Weber Foundation’s Research Centre Ukraine.

Footnotes

1/ Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino (Köln: König, 2011), 230.
2/ Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk, The Kharkiv School of Photography: Game Against Apparatus. Kharkiv: Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography, 2020, 17.
3/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 7.
4/ “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 58.
5/ Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” MOKSOP, accessed November 25, 2025

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary' at The Photographers' Gallery, London showing photographs from his series 'Case History' (1997-1998)

 

Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing photographs from his series Case History (1997-1998, below)

 

Case History, 1997-1998

Boris Mikhailov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) From the series 'Case History' 1997-1998

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Case History
1997-1998
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938) From the series 'Case History' 1997-1998

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Case History
1997-1998
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Case History' 1997-1998

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Case History
1997-1998
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

Urban opera of Boris Mikhailov

Olena Chervonik

In the [Case History] book preface, Mikhailov explains that already in 1997 he vividly apprehended the rupture of Ukrainian society into new, burgeoning social strata, when the new rich and the new poor began to acquire features of class identities with their own psychology and behavioural modalities. The new rich were already hard to approach, protecting themselves with bodyguards and other social fences. The new poor, however, specifically the bomzhes (homeless people with no social support) could still allow an outsider in their midst – this was “a chance”, according to Mikhailov, that could only last for a short period of time. Most of the book’s protagonists had only recently lost their homes. Their rapidly deteriorating social position was still uncertain, malleable, and flickering with hope. Yet, the transformation was inevitable, which propelled the artist to act: “For me it was very important that I took their photos when they were still like “normal” people. I made a book about the people who got into trouble but didn’t manage to harden so far.” [2] …

Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large. …

The majority of Mikhailov’s photographs provide no emotional crutches to lean on, no mechanism of ennobling or aestheticising infected abused flesh of the homeless. It is presented “as is”: frontal, looming large with all its detailed naturalistic vividness. If there is a visual code that Mikhailov activates in these images, it comes from a clinical rather than an art discourse, from surveilling patents for medical records. It is a discourse that John Tagg described as a nineteenth century record-keeping practice associated with certain disciplinary institutions such as an asylum or a prison that with the help of photography created a new social body of dependent subjects upon whom power could be exercised due to their newly-minted subaltern position.

Art, following Barthes’ dictum, domesticates and tames photography [21]. It generates the level of “studium”, accepted cultural knowledge that veils the trauma, renders it familiar, therefore trivial, therefore easily dismissed. Mikhailov makes his viewers constantly oscillate between images that give themselves for contemplation and images that confront with their clinical nature that can be scrutinised and observed but certainly not contemplated. Not one or the other type of image, but the switch between the two unsettles the viewing process. Mikhailov orchestrates poses and gestures of his subjects to create this visual roller-coster of plunging in and out of the aesthetic.

2/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1985)
21/ Matthias Christen, “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness. Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 52-66

Extract from Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” on the MOKSOP website, 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Dance, 1978

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Dance' 1978

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Dance
1978
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

 

The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out, 2013

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938) From the series 'The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out' 2013

 

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out
2013
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Collection Akademie der Künste, Berlin

 

 

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