In Keep Distance, Boris Mikhaïlov leads us on a wild,dizzying ride from which we emerge slightly breathless andunsteady. Acting as a kind of visual logbook, the series iscomposed primarily of recent images (2020–2024) with someolder photos mixed in. It has all the appearance of a mentaltracking shot, one in which fragmentary or haphazardlyframed images unsettle our gaze to such a degree that wefind ourselves doubting what we see. Street scenes, everyday objects and screenshots combinewith more intimate portraits: of his wife and collaboratorVita, his children, his inner life. The framing is always a littleunstable, on the edge of leaving something out of shot,never neutral. The title, Keep Distance, acts as a warning. We keep ourdistance, then – but what from? Visions of a world fastlosing all meaning? An obstinate past, the reminiscences ofwhich haunt every image? Like Mikhaïlov, it is up to us tofind some lightness amid all this gravity, a space for play. Keep Distance pursues the photographer’s long-standingobsessions: the constant tension between presence andself-effacement, between the banality of the things we seeand an unrelenting quest for beauty. It is a space in whichphotography becomes a tool against oblivion, against theend, against indifference. Jimmy Poulot-Cazajous is a doctoral student in CreativeWriting at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, where hisresearch focuses on the phenomenological poetics of time inthe work of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. He is the founder of themagazine La Coudée, and currently at work on a collectionof short stories. For Keep Distance, he has crafted a piece offiction that melds snapshots of intimacy with the kinds ofmotifs that so appeal to Boris Mikhaïlov: everyday life, thespectacularization of the banal, and how current events – atonce trivial and tragic – erupt into our online existences.
