Документално и реалистично във фотографията на Борис Михайлов
The Documental and the Realistic in the photography of Boris Mihaylov

Summary/Abstract: The paper studies the artistic work of the photographer Boris Mihaylov symptomatically in relation to the problematic of realism in the photographic art. Along with this, the so defined problematic is viewed worth debatable in the medium of photography as ‘a message without a code’ (Barthes). The study focuses on the problem of amateur photography, both as specifics of media settings and as a peculiar alibi for technical (instead of ideological) inexperience. The expose differentiates the two main periods in the works of Mihaylov, by discerning the play of un-intentionality and detachment until 1990 and his orientation towards social stereotypes, behaviours and codex of view (Sontag) in the years after the crash of the USSR until the present day. It presents how conceptual intentionality of the realistic orientation is able to reach extreme implications of the grotesque. Two contemporary socio-cultural ideas are put into play as a context for the analysis of the photographic series in the text, namely, the view about the resisting collective body to the process of its privatization (М. Riklin) and the rhetorical rhetorics of the ‘double after’[after the revolution – the crash of the USSR] (М. Tupitsina).

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