[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.

[May Day Parade], Boris Mikhailov (Ukrainian, born 1938), Gelatin silver print with applied color

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