In the USSR of the ’30s, Boris Mikhailov notes, there were no family photo albums because citizens were forbidden to own cameras. For nearly four decades, the self-taught photographer, born in the Ukraine in 1938, has been filling that individual and collective gap with his thinking person’s snapshots of daily life. Which has changed more, Mikhailov’s seemingly eclectic style or the world? If critics have tended to focus on the former, the photographer privileges the latter. This retrospective, curated by FMW director Urs Stahel, gives visitors the opportunity to decide
for themselves on the basis of several key series, including the Brezhnev-era “Red Series,” the pre-perestroika “Unfinished Dissertation,” and the post-perestroika “By the Ground,” “At Dusk,” and “Case History.”

— Miriam Rosen