Keep Distance is a hardcover Photobooks publication assembling 369 photographs across 224 pages — a fractured visual diary that draws on images made between 2020 and 2024, with earlier work woven throughout. The book does not proceed chronologically or thematically in any settled way. Fragmentary city scenes, tilted framings, screenshots, and incidental objects from public space appear alongside portraits of his wife and collaborator Vita, his children, and moments of interior life. The camera is positioned at the edge of things, consistently leaving something unresolved outside the frame.
The conceptual register is that of a diary of perception rather than documentation: instability is structural, not incidental. This approach extends concerns present throughout Mikhailov's practice — how to look at everyday life without fixing it, how to register vulnerability and absurdity without resolving them into a single account. His earlier series Case History, which addressed the post-Soviet transition and its human cost, established many of the formal and ethical questions that Keep Distance continues to work through. Mikhailov is a founding figure of the Kharkiv School of Photography, and his work is held in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern, and Hamburger Bahnhof. He received the Hasselblad Award in 2000 and the Kaiserring Prize in 2016.
Texts by Jimmy Poulot-Cazajous, written in both French and English across 14 pages, accompany the images in an unsteady rhythm that resists fixed meaning rather than anchoring it. The book was designed by Studio Mathieu Meyer and published by Note Note Éditions in an edition of 1,500 copies.
About Boris Mikhailov
Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a key figure in contemporary photography and a founding member of the informal Kharkiv School of Photography. Over several decades he has moved between conceptual strategies and documentary observation, using colour, black and white, hand-colouring, montage, and sequences to question how images shape understanding of everyday life.
His series Case History, which addresses the impact of the post-Soviet transition on the most vulnerable, is among the reference points of photographic history. Mikhailov's work is held in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern, and Hamburger Bahnhof. He is the recipient of the Hasselblad Award (2000) and the Kaiserring Prize (2016).
