基本説明
Keep Distance, est un journal visuel dans lequel Boris Mikhaïlov nous entraîne dans une marche trouble
et vertigineuse. Composée d'images récentes mêlées à des photos plus anciennes, la série avance
comme un traveling mental, où cadrages instables et fragments décalés perturbent notre regard et
brouillent nos certitudes.
Scènes de rue, objets du quotidien et captures d'écran se croisent avec des portraits plus intimes : ceux
de Vita, son épouse et collaboratrice, de ses enfants et de son intérieur. Rien n'est neutre ; chaque
image se place à la lisière du hors-champ.
Le titre Keep Distance agit comme un avertissement. Mais de quoi prendre ses distances ? Du monde
chaotique qui affleure dans ces visions, du passé qui insiste et hante chaque image. Mikhaïlov y oppose
une forme de légèreté, un espace où le jeu demeure possible.
Le projet prolonge ses thèmes essentiels : la tension entre présence et effacement, la beauté surgissant
du banal, et la photographie comme rempart contre l'oubli.
Full Description
In Keep Distance, Boris Mikhaïlov leads us on a wild,
dizzying ride from which we emerge slightly breathless and
unsteady. Acting as a kind of visual logbook, the series is
composed primarily of recent images (2020-2024) with some
older photos mixed in. It has all the appearance of a mental
tracking shot, one in which fragmentary or haphazardly
framed images unsettle our gaze to such a degree that we
find ourselves doubting what we see.
Street scenes, everyday objects and screenshots combine
with more intimate portraits: of his wife and collaborator
Vita, his children, his inner life. The framing is always a little
unstable, on the edge of leaving something out of shot,
never neutral.
The title, Keep Distance, acts as a warning. We keep our
distance, then - but what from? Visions of a world fast
losing all meaning? An obstinate past, the reminiscences of
which haunt every image? Like Mikhaïlov, it is up to us to
find some lightness amid all this gravity, a space for play.
Keep Distance pursues the photographer's long-standing
obsessions: the constant tension between presence and
self-effacement, between the banality of the things we see
and an unrelenting quest for beauty. It is a space in which
photography becomes a tool against oblivion, against the
end, against indifference.
Jimmy Poulot-Cazajous is a doctoral student in Creative
Writing at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, where his
research focuses on the phenomenological poetics of time in
the work of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. He is the founder of the
magazine La Coudée, and currently at work on a collection
of short stories. For Keep Distance, he has crafted a piece of
fiction that melds snapshots of intimacy with the kinds of
motifs that so appeal to Boris Mikhaïlov: everyday life, the
spectacularization of the banal, and how current events - at
once trivial and tragic - erupt into our online existences.
