Case History (Russian: История болезни) by Boris Mikhailov, made in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1997-98, portrays people experiencing homelessness amid the city's post-Soviet economic transformation. Returning to his longtime home after a year in Berlin, Mikhailov encountered a refurbished commercial center and foreign advertising alongside a newly visible homeless population.
He described this condition as a social "zero state," in which the Soviet collapse had produced new wealth, deep poverty, displaced identities, and altered moral relations. Case History examines survival, historical memory, and the politics of visibility, asking how photography can preserve lives that official Soviet visual culture had often excluded.
The visual language combines color portraiture and street-based social observation with directed performance. Subjects search for food, wash, embrace, expose marked or injured bodies, and hold possessions amid factories, socialist architecture, and commercial billboards. Some gestures recall Christian or art-historical compositions, while direct gazes and static poses create a tension between individual presence and social typology. Mikhailov associated the commercial color aesthetic of "express-photo" with the new era. The finished works were chromogenic color prints, sometimes enlarged to nearly 1.5 meters high.
Mikhailov paid participants to pose, regarding the monetary exchange both as a means of making the photographs and as a reflection of the new social relations he observed in post-Soviet society. His direction was generally limited to requests such as repeating an observed gesture, moving closer together, or undressing.
Scalo published Case History as a 478-page book in 1999. Parts were shown that year at daadgalerie in Berlin and Scalo Galerie in Zurich, followed by presentations at The Photographers' Gallery in London and in a 2001 Hasselblad Center retrospective. The book received the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award and the Rencontres d'Arles photography-book prize in 2000. MoMA's 2011 exhibition was the first in-depth American museum presentation, and the project later appeared in retrospectives in Paris and Rome. Reception has remained divided between readings of visibility and collaborative performance and critiques of voyeurism, coercion, and the imbalance created by money, nudity, and the camera.
