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.