• Front cover of Keep Distance by Boris Mikhailov with central photograph of a white bird and a black bird against a black leather-like background.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance with vertical colour images of a coiled hose, a doll, concrete architecture, and people on a stairway.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance combining an airplane wing in stormy clouds, fragments of classical paintings, and a tree trunk.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance showing a glittering winged horse on stage beside a photograph of a small carved child figure in a niche.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance with colour photographs of people sleeping rough in the city, an underpass, and a silhouetted figure on stairs.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance showing a courtyard view, a woman posing indoors, two people on a bed, and a winter street scene.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance with city pipework, a sofa piled with clothes, a flea-market stall, and a crowded street gathering.
  • Interior spread from Keep Distance featuring ground details, a glass office building, a mannequin and pram, and a seated figure in an interior.
  • Street scenes and performers, including a dancer and a man balancing a glass sphere, from Boris Mikhailov’s photobook Keep Distance.
  • Medical monitor, a patient in hospital, a nude woman curled on a bed, and a market stall with sword, in Boris Mikhailov’s Keep Distance.
  • A man holding his head, prosthetic limbs on a table, a handwritten diagram and a house at night, from the photobook Keep Distance by Boris Mikhailov.
  • Close-up of an eye painted on a wall above rubble and an abstract cracked surface, with blank page, in Boris Mikhailov’s Keep Distance.
  • Shadow silhouette, a damaged church tower and upright missiles forming a tense urban landscape in Keep Distance by Boris Mikhailov.
  • Traffic lights, a nude body with a glass on the legs, a blurred figure on a bed, and a night street with uniformed workers in Keep Distance.
  • Close view of English essay pages titled “Blindsights” from Boris Mikhailov’s photobook Keep Distance.
  • Spine of the black hardcover photobook Keep Distance by Boris Mikhailov, published by Note Note Éditions.
  • Close-up of Keep Distance cover showing textured black board and inset image of a white bird and black bird in flight.
  • Back board of Keep Distance photobook by Boris Mikhailov, black faux-leather cover with small Note Note Éditions logo.
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Note Note Éditions

Keep Distance

Keep Distance - Boris Mikhailov - Hardcover Photobook

Boris Mikhailov
€68,00
€68,00
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incl. VAT. Estimated shipping costs: €3,00. Delivery Time: 2-5 days

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Keep Distance is a dense photobook by Boris Mikhailov, assembling recent and archival images into a fractured visual diary of streets, screenshots and intimate portraits.

  • Binding: hardcover
  • Length: 224 pages
  • Content: 369 photographs + 14 text pages (French & English)
  • Size: 24 × 18 cm
  • Edition: 1500 copies
  • Publisher: NOTE NOTE ÉDITIONS
  • ISBN: 978-2-493467-09-6
  • Design: Studio Mathieu Meyer
  • Text: Jimmy Poulot-Cazajous (French & English)

About Keep Distance

Keep Distance is a new photobook by Boris Mikhailov that reads like a restless visual logbook. Composed mainly of images from 2020–2024, with earlier photographs woven in, Keep Distance unfolds as a mental tracking shot: fragmentary city scenes, tilted horizons and haphazard framings that unsettle the viewer’s gaze. Screenshots, everyday objects and small details from public space are set alongside portraits of his wife and collaborator Vita, his children and his own inner life, so that Keep Distance becomes a diary of perception rather than a linear account of events.

Printed as a 24 × 18 cm hardcover with 224 pages and 369 photographs, Keep Distance combines French and English texts by Jimmy Poulot-Cazajous with Mikhailov’s images in an unsteady rhythm that keeps slipping away from fixed meaning. The camera is never neutral; it hovers at the edge of the frame, constantly threatening to leave something important outside the image. This instability mirrors the uncertainty of recent years, while also extending concerns present throughout Mikhailov’s work: how to look at everyday life, how to register vulnerability and absurdity without smoothing them into a single narrative.

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 freely between conceptual strategies and documentary observation, using colour, black and white, hand-colouring, montage and sequences to question how images shape our understanding of everyday life. Series such as Case History, which addresses the impact of the post-Soviet transition on the most vulnerable, have become reference points in photographic history.

Mikhailov’s work has been widely exhibited and collected by major institutions including MoMA, Tate Modern and Hamburger Bahnhof. He is the recipient of awards such as the Hasselblad Award (2000) and the Kaiserring Prize (2016). Keep Distance continues his sustained engagement with social and personal realities, focusing on the instability of recent years while maintaining the irony, directness and formal experimentation that characterise his practice.

Packaging & Shipping

We pack books to arrive in the condition described: protected corners, rigid backing, paper cushioning, and a sturdy outer package. Heavier or collectible editions receive an extra layer of protection. Any defects are documented on the product page—packing doesn’t hide condition, it reduces transit risk.

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Publisher / Manufacturer: NOTE NOTE ÉDITIONS
Country of origin: France
Website: https://www.notenote.eu

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