The Salt Lake series is from 1986. Contrary to the works on display in Paris (see above), these pictures were taken when Ukraine was still part of the USSR. The 50 pictures in the series were taken secretly, a common practice, photography was considered subversive (the KGB discovered, among others, nude pictures of his wife ). Fired from his factory, the photographer devoted all of his time to photography, documenting the fall of the regime and the transformations that would follow.

One year after the Chernobyl catastrophe and three years before the fall of the system, in 1986, Boris Mikhailov wanted to see if tourists and this southern Ukrainian lake had changed. His father, who lived in the area in 1920's, described it as a very popular location for its warm salt waters, known for their therapeutic virtues.

He discovered that if the people were still present, the landscape had changed. It is now surrounded by belching chimneys and factories with pipelines spitting polluted waters in the lake. It didn’t seem to change the habits of the residents living in this industrial wasteland they are captured in these surrealist scenes in yellowish tinted oversized prints.

This is a visionary remembrance of another time .

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Boris Mikhailov
Salt Lake
20 january- 11 march 2012

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