Mikhailov’s Case History series examines the social oppression and devastating poverty of a disenfranchised community in Kharkiv, Ukraine: those who had been left homeless by the rise of the capitalist oligarchy following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The rich and the homeless—the new classes of a new society—this was, as we had been taught, one of the features of capitalism,” Mikhailov observed. A haunting document of post-Soviet urban conditions, the series captures the failed promise of capitalism with poetry and grit.
