Boris Mikhailov

The images of Mr Yeltsin in the late 1980’s on the BBC today led me back to looking at Mikhailov’s photos that document the Soviet Union from the 1970’s to the collapse - he is still active to day, capturing the modern Ukraine, but his earlier works sought to depict the reality behind the facade of the Brezhnev and Gorbachev periods. Unlike many photo-realist artists, however, he did not resort to the use of black and white film stock - all of the photos I’ve seen are in glorious 1970’s style technicolor (no mean feat, given how difficult it must have been to obtain the film and get it processed). And all of his photos gloriously skew the norms of Soviet iconography and propaganda - farmhands sitting on the toilet, the nomenklatura holidaying in the Crimea with Marx and Engels on the wall, and so on. However, he never seems as knowing as other late-Soviet artists - the photos also frequently depict the most banal moments in Soviet life - as above, as well as the homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts.

Happy Easter

Away for the next couple of days.

Ealing, 08.34 today

Should I end it?

This blog, I mean. I am feeling dramatically uninspired at the moment. Exhaustion, translation, work, and an X-Box 360 have all contributed to this sorry excuse for apathy.

I would have to delete it all, of course, as I worry when I stumble upon un-updated blogs (two links there!), in the same way one wonders about people in the black and white photos for sale at Camden market - who are they, what happened to them, and why were these very personal tokens cast aside?

Mel Torme

A weekend in my hometown. Wonderful aerial pictures (the old ones, at least) over at Portsmouth College’s “Portsmouth From The Air” galleries. I have to say tht I adore the saturation of colours on 1950’s-1980’s films, before cameras and film became electronic, digitised and manageable. The colours that frequent not only Soviet postcards of towns (I have a wonderful set from Kazan, as well as Petrozavodsk and Kizhi, and, I think, another from Moscow), but also British films, postcards and brochures from my childhood. It may be that many of the photos in these were taken in the 1970’s, a period not renowned, in the UK at least, for a fear of garish colour(s), but, as you can see from the sample, this may have had something to do with colour processing as well as the decade-long temporary national colourblindness. I am 99% sure that the Solent has never looked quite so blue (except possibly millions of years ago when much of the South Cost was part of a tropical sea).

In fact, having perused the site further, this picture, from the early 60’s actually has my family home in it - now, I have a romanticised view of childhood summer holidays that seemed to be six weeks of permanently sunny freedom, but even through my rose-tinted spectacles, my patch never looks like this. And an entire housing estate is missing in the bottom left-hand corner, as well as two sizeable naval estates to the top left and bottom right (both of these have now been handed over to housing associations as the naval influence in Portsmouth diminishes). Bizarre, like GoogleEarth with a time machine.

Ginger coos

Happiness

is not a cigar called Hamlet - it is browsing the London Transport Museum photo archive. Relive your youth. Look at your old Tube station. Be amazed at the art-deco glory of Boston Manor station. Or not.

U can’t touch this

Beckham’s resignation in full