KEEP DISTANCE

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.