Styles / Staged & conceptual

Kharkiv School of Photography

1971–present. Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR. Also called KSOP or KSP.

Where the lights stand

Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.

Where you have seen it

The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.

Snapshots of everyday life, parades, nudes and found family portraits are hand-coloured in loud, careless colour; two colour slides are laid together as a 'sandwich'; prints are collaged, toned, scratched or made deliberately 'bad': small, blurred and flawed. Shown in series and books, the pictures aim at irony and a blow to the viewer.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

Start from a black-and-white snapshot of ordinary life, a parade, a market, a found family or passport portrait, and colour it by hand in loud, uneven colour that runs over edges and into the margin, so that the colour mocks official cheerfulness instead of perfecting the picture.
Lay two colour slides on top of each other and project or print the pair as one 'sandwich': a body over a street, a face over a texture, so that the combination says what a single permitted frame could not.
Cut, repeat and paste fragments by hand into a collage, or work the material itself: solarise, posterise, scratch the negative, and let film defects, stains and toning show.
When the subject is a poor reality, print it poorly: small, flat, blurred and flawed black-and-white prints, film defects and perforations showing, instead of the glossy, full-toned print.
Photograph what the official picture leaves out, naked bodies, drab estates, hospitals, the hollow rituals of state holidays, and build each picture to strike the viewer like a blow.
Work in series, pairs and books, at times with handwritten notes or captions, and let the sequence and the comment carry the irony.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Shadow edges: Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
Shadow depth: Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).

How the style is lit

Flat overcast or snowy daylight on streets, markets and parades, giving an even grey print to colour by hand.
Hard sun outdoors on nude figures in a field or by a river.
Storm-dark, high-contrast skies behind figures seen from below, joined to them in collage.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

40 mmf/81/60 sISO 100

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

Then: 35–50 mm · f/5.6–f/11 · 1/250–1/30 s on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look. Small 35 mm cameras with normal lenses, colour slide film for the Overlays and a horizon panoramic camera for By the Ground and At Dusk. f/5.6–f/11 at 1/30–1/250 s in flat daylight is inferred; what matters most is done afterwards, by hand and in the darkroom.
White balance: Mostly black-and-white film coloured by hand afterwards; colour slides are ordinary daylight film left uncorrected, their colour remade by laying two together (inferred).

Focal length: Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
Angle: The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject. Looking up: the subject towers.
Distance: Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
Crop & fill: The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
Instant: A casual, unplanned instant, taken quickly.
Many times: Several exposures laid over each other in one frame.

Step 3

Direct

Few conventional poses: strangers at markets and parades are caught unaware, marching, walking or turned away, often seen from slightly below; friends are asked to ape the heroic, athletic stances of official pictures or to act out a happening outdoors; found portraits keep the stiff, square-on pose and still face of the passport photograph.

Body position: Caught or posed in mid-step, one foot lifted, clothes swinging.
The moment: Existing images taken over and photographed again. Ordinary photographs by and for ordinary people, or images that look like them. People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.

Step 4

Style the set

Nothing is styled for the camera: people wear what they wore that day (headscarves, fur hats, winter coats, a vendor's white coat) or parade medals and sashes, and streets, markets and estates are shown as drab as they were; the colour is added afterwards by hand.

Clothes: What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.
How much is styled: Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.

Step 5

Finish

Monochrome: A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys.
Colour: Colour painted onto a monochrome print. Strong, dense colours.
Film: Transparencies: dense, saturated colour. A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed.
Texture: Marks of age and handling on the image.
Post-production: Marks made by hand on the negative or the print. Several photographs combined into one picture.
Shown as: Pictures made and shown as a set.

Stay away from state persuasion & propaganda, glamour & aspiration, monumental & heroic, clean & noiseless, soft studio light, full glamour make-up, pristine & spotless and fully art-directed.

Before you shoot it

In such work, keep every nude to consenting adults, and do not stage poverty or illness for effect. The irony is aimed at Soviet propaganda: do not turn its portraits of leaders, red flags and parades into nostalgic Soviet kitsch.

Where to see it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

In copyright, so linked

Sans titre (SOTS-ART series) , Boris Mikhailov, 1975–1986. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris.
From the series Overlays , Boris Mikhailov, 1968–1981. Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics (Ukrainian Institute and the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography), ksp.ui.org.ua.
[May Day Parade] , Boris Mikhailov, 1975, printed 1986. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
(Sans titre) , Oleksandr Suprun, 1997. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris.
At Dusk , Boris Mikhailov, 1993. Tate.
Springtime in the Forest (Lilies of the Valley) , Oleksandr Suprun, 1970s. Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics (Ukrainian Institute and the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography), ksp.ui.org.ua.

With other styles

Pairs with Provoke and are-bure-boke.

The opposite: Surrealist photography. Both superimpose, montage and paint on prints, but surrealism stages the unconscious in a dark studio, while Kharkiv lays its overlays and colour over documentary snapshots of daily life; keep the source pictures ordinary and public, and let the strangeness read as a comment on them.

The opposite: Indian painted photographs. Indian court painters coloured portraits carefully to honour rank; Kharkiv colours carelessly and garishly, spilling over the margin, to deflate official imagery, so let the brush show and leave the colour unconvincing.

Pairs with Diaristic snapshot photography. Both photograph friends, nudes and their own city from the inside; take the diaristic snapshot's closeness, but add the comment in the margin, the overlay or the hand colour that turns a diary into an argument.

Sources

Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics, project site with the Ukrainian Institute and the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography, About: https://ksp.ui.org.ua/about-ksop/ (a 'school of artistic thought' of three generations; the Vremya group of eight artists in the 1970s with Mikhailov as informal leader; naked bodies and the bigotry of communist propaganda; overlaying slide frames, hand-colouring and collaging against the official requirement of realistic depiction; the 'blow theory', an image like a punch in the face; the only public exhibition in Kharkiv, 1983, closed on its opening day; the Gosprom group and others in the late 1980s and 1990s; the Shilo group's postmodernist comments; little access to Western art magazines, so no imitation of Western imagery)
KSP, Boris Mikhailov: https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/boris-mikhailov/ (born 1938; 'the engine of the Vremya group'; Red Series 1965–1978; Overlays 1968–1981, 'superimpositions' or 'sandwiches' of two colour slides, 'formally new, surrealistic, and grotesque', the two frames 'either screen-projected in a slide show or printed on color photo paper', with an overlay reproduced and captioned '© Boris Mikhailov. Overlays'; 'bad photography for bad reality' in the 1980s, small, sloppily printed, blurred, low-contrast prints showing film defects or perforation; Unfinished Dissertation, 1984, book 1998, prints pasted on the back of lecture notes with handwritten comments; By the Ground, 1991, and At Dusk, 1993, panoramic, chemically toned, 'a visual representation of the deteriorating quality of post-Soviet life'; a lurik as a Soviet commercial genre of enlarged, retouched, hand-coloured portraits, 'postmortem portraits included', family or passport photos by origin, and the Luriki series 1971–1985 as 'the first strategic use of found material in contemporary Soviet photography' (John P. Jacobs); I am not I, 1992, nude self-portraits; Case History, 1997–1998, homeless people as nude models for staged photos; Temptation of Death, 2019, over 150 diptychs)
KSP artist pages: Evgeniy Pavlov https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/evgeniy-pavlov/ (born 1949; co-founder of Vremya in 1971; The Violin, 1972, a happening of young nude male hippies, published in Fotografia, Poland, 1973, and treated in the USSR as ideological diversion; overlays used by Mikhailov, Maliovany and Pavlov; later collages, montages, hand colouring, scratching and intentional film damage), Oleg Maliovany https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/oleg-malyovany/ (born 1945; overlays, collages and posterisations from 1970; collages with Suprun from 1974; aniline dyes), Jury Rupin https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/yuri-rupin/ (1946–2008; co-founder; solarisations; Sauna, 1972; nudes against socialist realism), Oleksandr Suprun https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/alexander-suprun/ (born 1945; photo-collage, in 'the pre-Photoshop 1970s' a laborious manual technique of cutting out fragments, mounting them and reproducing the result; one flower fragment used 51 times in Lilies of the Valley, or Springtime in the Forest, whose image the page shows, '© Alexandr Suprun'; elderly people and children 'placed against a sinister-looking urban background with dramatic high-contrast skies'; to get material for his collages, 'a candid camera concealed in a shopping bag and an ingenious device to operate it'; the 'frog perspective'), Anatoly Makiyenko https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/anatoly-makiyenko/ (born 1949; joined Vremya in 1974; high-contrast street pictures; toning, coloured pencils, markers and acrylic on prints), Victor Kochetov https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/victor-kochetov/ (1947–2021; hand colouring 'from subtly highlighting a detail to a colouring-book page', a kitsch parody of socialist realism), Roman Pyatkovka https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/roman-pyatkovka/ (born 1955; The Maternity Ward, 1989; The Phantoms of the '30s, 1990, on the famine of 1932–33, with multiple reproduction and hand scratching; The Games of Libido, 1995, 'negative montage'), the Gosprom group https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/gosprom/ (the Kontakt group, 1984–1986; Maslov, Starko, Pedan; sharp black-and-white documentary), Sergey Bratkov https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/sergey-bratkov/ (born 1960; Gosprom from 1987; Up/Down Gallery 1993–1997), the Shilo group https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/shilo-group/ (formed 2010; lith printing; The Finished Dissertation, 2013; Krasnoshchok's The Hospital; Lebedinsky set up the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography in 2018)
Luca Fiore, 'The Dissident Photographers of Ukraine', Aperture, 25 March 2022: https://aperture.org/editorial/the-dissident-photographers-of-ukraine/ (Pavlov and Jury Rupin founded the Vremia group in Kharkiv in the early 1970s; members including Mikhailov, Makiyenko, Maliovany, Sitnichenko, Suprun and 'the late Gennadiy Tubalev'; solarisation, 'photo-sandwiches' and collages; the work had to act on the viewer 'like an unexpected blow'; The Violin, 1972; a single exhibition in 1983, open for two hours; the Shilo group, 2010; the museum founded in 2018 on Sergiy Lebedynskyy's initiative)
Oksana Barshynova, 'De Kyiv à Kharkiv, les artistes ukrainiens en résistance', Centre Pompidou magazine, 4 January 2023: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/magazine/article/de-kyiv-a-kharkiv-les-artistes-ukrainiens-en-resistance (the exhibition 'Ukraine. Une donation contemporaine' with a room on the Kharkiv School; Vremya founded in 1971; Pavlov and Mikhailov; printing experiments by Maliovany, Rupin and Suprun; Solonsky and Pyatkovka; Shilo's ironic restagings; Pavlov, Violon, 1972, and Suprun, untitled, 1997, illustrated)
Centre Pompidou collection records: Mikhailov, Sans titre, SOTS-ART series, 1975–1986, black-and-white print hand-coloured by the artist, AM 2013-464 https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/c9n7Kk7 (the retouching and colouring of small portraits as a practice rooted in Soviet tradition; 'Inclure le kitsch dans l'idéologie soviétique, c'était déjà en parler de façon ironique'); Pavlov, Violon, 1972, 35 gelatin silver prints, gift of Tatiana Pavlova 2021, AM 2021-877 https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/OZXeR9k; Maliovany, Age of Beauty, 1972, chromogenic print, AM 2021-864 https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/hm3C8qV; Suprun, Sans titre, 1997, gelatin silver print, AM 2021-871 https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/hSPd1sI (documentary photography mixed with collage; shot 'à l'aide d'une caméra dissimulée dans un sac fabriqué sur mesure', which explains 'les légères contre-plongées et perspectives déformées')
Boris Mikhailov, [May Day Parade], 1975, printed 1986, gelatin silver print with applied color, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.37.3: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267072 (in the 1970s Mikhailov revived hand colouring, applying 'candy-bright hues to anonymous found photographs and to his own black-and-white snapshots of everyday life'; a 'scathingly ironic view of the compulsory masquerade of official Soviet culture'; the Met also holds hand-coloured prints of 1975–81 and 1987, 1994.37.1, .2 and .4; the museum's image shows black film-edge bands down the left and right of the print)
Boris Mikhailov, Untitled, 1984, gelatin silver print with applied hand coloring, Art Institute of Chicago, 2018.16: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/242139 (read through the museum's public API; friends instructed to assume the poses of idealised athletic bodies of official Soviet imagery; colour applied 'so irreverently that a stroke of green shoots into the margins'; poking fun at the language of official representation)
Tate: 'Red', Boris Mikhailov, 1968–75, printed c. 1999–2000, 84 photographs, digital c-print on paper, T13358 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mikhailov-red-t13358; 'At Dusk', 1993, gelatin silver print on paper, tinted, P20369 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mikhailov-at-dusk-p20369 (from the pages' titles and catalogue keywords)
Pinault Collection, Boris Mikhaïlov, Luriki (Colored Soviet Portrait), 1971–1985: https://lesoeuvres.pinaultcollection.com/en/node/2095 (38 black-and-white photographs, partly or fully hand-coloured; family-album photographs and his own portraits; parody of the artificial colouring of Soviet propaganda)
Images Vevey, Boris Mikhailov, Yesterday's Sandwich (Biennale 2022): https://www.images.ch/archives/en/artiste/boris-mikhailov/ (late 1960s and early 1970s; two slides accidentally superimposed in a 'sandwich', then many combinations; work censored by the regime); the book Yesterday's Sandwich, Phaidon Press, Open Library record with Library of Congress call number TR685 .M53 2009: https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9780714848563
Kharkiv School of Photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_School_of_Photography (used as a lead only: the Kharkiv regional photo club, the Vremia founders and members, 'bad photography', luriki, Suprun's 51 repeats, Pavlov's The Violin, the generations and MOKSOP; facts kept here were confirmed in the sources above)
Boris Mikhailov, Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics (Ukrainian Institute and MOKSOP): https://ksp.ui.org.ua/artists/boris-mikhailov/ (Overlays: 'Two overlaid color slide film frames were either screen-projected in a slide show or printed on color photo paper'; 'bad photography': small, sloppily printed, often blurred black-and-white photos showing film defects or perforation)
Boris Mikhailov: Refracted Times, Marian Goodman Gallery: https://mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/593-boris-mikhailov-refracted-times (By the Ground, 1991, 'Through a horizon camera that featured a panoramic point of view', shot from hip height; At Dusk, 1993, 'Using a horizon panoramic camera again, the images are hand-colored cobalt blue')
Oleksandr Suprun, (Sans titre), 1997, Centre Pompidou: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/hSPd1sI (his pictures taken with 'une caméra dissimulée dans un sac fabriqué sur mesure', which explains 'les légères contre-plongées et perspectives déformées')
Kharkiv School of Photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_School_of_Photography (used as a lead only: the Vremya group founded in 1971; 'bad photography')