[May Day Parade]
Boris Mikhailov Ukrainian
Not on view
In the 1970s Mikhailov revived the anachronistic technique of hand coloring, applying candy-bright hues to anonymous found photographs and to his own black-and-white snapshots of everyday life in the Soviet Union. This garishly colored photograph of a parade of workers, each sporting a red sash that proclaims him “Winner of the Competition,” puts forward a scathingly ironic view of the compulsory masquerade of official Soviet culture while also alluding to the regime’s insidious history of photographic falsification.