The three photogravures Boris Mikhailov created in BORCH Editions’ Copenhagen printmaking studio in 2005 reference his photography series Case History (1997–98), a body of work exploring the troubling circumstances of marginalized, homeless people in the Ukrainian city of Krakov after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhailov edited the original photographs by applying paint to their surfaces before transferring them onto photogravure plates, exploring the artistic possibilities of printmaking for the medium of photography.

The nude body, an illegal artistic subject matter in the former Soviet Union, is a central motif in Boris Mikhailov’s work. Indeed, his career as a full-time photographer started in the 1960s, after the KGB had him fired from his job as an engineer because he had used the state-owned factory’s camera and darkroom to take and develop nude photos of his then wife.
His subsequent career-spanning exploration of the genre is, like the rest of his work, multi-faceted, ranging from social-realist depictions of everyday life in Ukraine to life-affirming depictions of the human body and whimsical self-portraits. In its unpolished directness, his untitled 2005 photogravure is characterized by an almost brutal intrusiveness.