Boris Mikhailov (b.1938) lived in his hometown of Kharkov in the Ukraine until the collapse of the USSR. Trained as an engineer, he worked in a factory until 1968, when he was forced to quit his job and he became a photographer. His work has been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993, the Kunsthalle in Zurich in 1996, and more recently the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, which organized a retrospective show of his work in 2003. Boris Mikhailov now lives in Berlin.