Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Is there reportage or documentary photography with self-irony? With a cheerful tone of voice and an open back door, the doubt, then, of perhaps being wrong with one's own photographic assertion? Does that even exist? With all the photography that we can pars pro toto call "Magnum," I don't see that. On the contrary, there continues to be great seriousness, sometimes even beer seriousness, displayed fervour. And doesn't this seriousness, which neither thinks about nor focuses on one's own position, often make this form of documentary photography look outdated and untrue? With the fragmentation of truths, the belief in the one great truth soon acquires a dense, long beard.
I ask myself these questions while I think about Boris Mikhailov, who will be awarded the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar for 2015, one of the highest awards for contemporary art in Germany. Mikhailov's work, now spanning more than four decades, "has" exactly that. Irony, cheerfulness, a play with reality and with oneself repeatedly characterize his work. Next to deep trenches, from which the hardness of the world is evaporating with full force, with the stench and rushing of pus into our pleasant life. His post-Soviet works on Ukraine teach us horror par excellence.
He documents and he dances. He looks, exactly, does not close his eyes, and laughs at the same time. With a mischievous look in his eyes, he looks at us as he turns footballs into breasts and milk bottles with oranges into penises and testicles. World events are taken seriously and then replayed in the family circle. So that life, with a good gain in knowledge, can be lived in spite of everything, even remain worth living. Surrealist dissolves, hand colorizations similar to folk art, amateur snapshots, banal photography with diary-like notes, self-dramatizations, naked against a black background, and direct, hard, garish color photography: that's what Boris Mikhailov has been presenting since the seventies in his dense, diverse works. To the delight and irritation, to the enthusiasm and disturbance of the audience in East and West.
"We" - the modern age, the photographic modern age, the ongoing photographic documentary seriousness - have a hard time with the grotesque, with the shrill laughter at the horror of the world. Boris Mikhailov, however, repeatedly appears as a harlequin, as a dandy, as a fool, sometimes also as a lazy macho, laughingly withdrawing for a moment the heaviness from the burden and jokingly the dullness from the boredom. His appearances transform photography into a great world theatre; they relieve the documentary image of its compulsion to direct reference, because the things depicted do not interest him in themselves, their appearance, their similarity, but only in their function in the "being of the world".
Boris Mikhailov - lamenting singer, laughing fool, surrealist eroticist and sharp phenomenologist at the same time - has created a work out of his historical context that manifests itself across all borders and ultimately presents a deeply touching image of the wounded, threatened human soul.