PLEASE ENJOY the ONE-SELLER-AUCTION by 5Uhr30.com (Ecki Heuser, Cologne, Germany) - with INTERNATIONAL PHOTOBOOKS from my PRIVATE COLLECTION and from RECENT ACQUISITATIONS. SCARCE, SOUGHT-AFTER book by well-known Ukrainian photographer and artist Boris Mikhailov. Limited to 1000 copies only. Boris Mikhailov is famous for many great photobooks like "Unfinished Dissertation" (Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, A History, vol 2, page 309), "By the ground. At dusk." or "Case History" (all mentioned in "The Photobook, A History). "The Wedding: Challenging and provocative, Mikhailov`s photographs document human casualties living in post communist Eastern Europe after the demise of the Soviet Union. They are unflinching and ruthless depictions of poverty and the homeless (also known as Bomzhes) living in the margins of Russia`s new economic regime without social support or care. This series presents a simulated wedding between two homeless people often naked and in sexual poses, set amongst their own surroundings. Mikhailov`s photographs, often presented in these wry even humorous situations, only add to the absurdity of this tragic life. The onlooker experiences feelings of empathy and disgust as they guiltily absorb the content of these engaging yet horrifying pictures, peering into an unknown world of madness, destitution, longing and death in an un-redemptive portrait of outcast humanity.` The Wedding is bound in imitation of a traditional wedding album, with faux-leather and gold-debossed lettering designed by calligrapher John Stevens. It is further finished off with a text by Adrian Searle." (from the publisher) IF YOU WIN MORE THAN 1 OF MY BOOKS IN THIS AUCTION, YOU WILL PAY ONLY 1 X SHIPPING COSTS - WORLDWIDE. Mörel Books, London. 2010. First edition, first printing. Hardcover (as issued). 240 x 235 mm. 58 pages. Text: Adrian Searle. Text in English. Condition: Inside excellent, very fresh and flawless; clean with no marks and with no foxing. Outside very fresh with light trace of use; neat dent at the top of the front cover (with no consequence for inside), no other remarkable defects. Overall fine condition. Born in the former Soviet Union Boris Mikhailov (born 1938) lived and worked for several decades in his hometown Kharkov, Ukraine. He received an education as an engineer and started to teach himself the practice of photography. Today he is one of the most successful and well-known photographers, who already was actively working in soviet times. His work very much is influenced in the means of Concept-Art and Social-Documentary-Photography. At the end of the 1960s he had his first exhibition. After the KGB found nude-pictures of his wife he was set off his job as an engineer and started to full-time work with photography. He shot a series of everyday-life scenes-documentation. "The break-up of the former Soviet union has brutally torn apart the social fabric across all of its former territories. Building a civil society and a functioning market economy will take a long time. Meanwhile, there are many who have lost everything-their jobs, their homes, their social network, their identity-roaming the streets, scrambling for food and alcohol, looking for a place to sleep. Boris Mikhailov has followed their lives for a number of years. Case History is a collective portrait of those whose lives have fallen apart amidst the turmoil of epochal change, people whom history has left behind. Street kids getting high, adults looking for food, dirt-covered men and women washing themselves in Mikhailov's apartment, homeless people caressing each other's decrepit bodies: unflinchingly brutal and yet dignified images of aspects of the human condition that we prefer to repress." "It seems to me that my personal uncertainty (it is not clear where I live-in Kharkov or somewhere in the West, where I work, etc.), my instability in society, on the formal level, has transformed the border between documentary and scenery within the framework of the documentary." "Case History is not just a chronicle of the crass reality of a historical transition. It is a ravishing work of art offering a bold, radically candid perspective on the human body, its weakness, and mortality. Mikhailov shows us how history has inscribed itself on the bodies of these Ukrainian homeless. He investigates the gruesome physical marks of social change. Gentle and brutal, wry and sad, a book that presents life in all of its contradictions and extremes." (from the publisher)