Case History is a monumental and deeply troubling photographic record of the social disintegration in post-Soviet Ukraine. Captured between 1997 and 1998 in Kharkiv, Boris Mikhailov documents the lives of the “bomzhes”—a new class of homeless people created by the collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of a ruthless capitalist oligarchy. The book features over 400 life-size color photographs that are unsparing in their depiction of disease, poverty, and human frailty. Mikhailov often paid his subjects to pose, blurring the lines between pure documentary and staged performance, which remains a point of intense critical debate. The work is widely regarded as one of the most significant and challenging photobooks of the 1990s, cited in Parr & Badger’s “The Photobook: A History, Volume II.”
