Quotes by
Boris Mikhailov

It’s not important how you show something. It’s important to show it at the right time.

As soon as I got to New York, in the late ‘80s, I went to Harlem. Everybody told me not to go, and if I went, not to take pictures. Of course I went, and I went with a camera.

Manipulating with money is somehow a new way of legal relations in all areas of the former USSR... I wanted to transmit the feeling that in that place and now, people can be openly manipulated... I wanted to copy or perform the same relations which exist in society between a model and myself.

Photographers must be very aggressive and open for life. You have to be a very social person, you have to be able to look inside yourself.

We as spectators are the ones who are humiliated and degraded by the confrontation, exposed to a truth we cannot walk away from and cannot bear to share.

I was always against good technique because it didn’t work with Soviet life. Good quality equals foreign life.

As a photographer with unofficial authority I discover, I observe, I clandestinely stalk.

You photograph one object, then another, you place them between one another and this unintentional connection turns into a story about life in its entirety. And all this is born from chance, and this chance is photography.

I know people do not want to look at such photos, but only if you look at misery in a picture do you start to notice it in the street.

I intuitively felt that photography was the field where I could express myself as a citizen and a human being.

Photographic accident may be more interesting than a consciously constructed collage.

When you’re open to life, it responds to you. That is what an intuitive possibility of photography is—to crawl deeper into the depths of life.

Through the ass of this woman I saw the world.

They say about me, that I proceed like a cat in hiding, watching. I am waiting for the best moment to press the button of the camera.