One of the first series created by Boris Mikhailov, Yesterday’s Sandwich presents us with the extraordinary double world of Soviet drudgery juxtaposed with sex, beauty, war, and everyday life. Realized in an era of artistic restrictions imposed by the communists in the late 1960s and 1970s, the photographs could not be published or shown publicly at the time of their making. Representation of Soviet life is overwritten in these playful images of beauty and grotesque. At a time when digital processes had yet to be conceived, the overlapping images were manipulated manually. Winner of the Hasselblad Award in 2000, the Citibank Photography Award in 2001, the Spectrum International Prize for Photography in 2012, and the Goslar Kaiserring Prize in 2015, Mikhailov is an extraordinarily influential photographer and has been chosen to represent the Ukraine at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
