The Wilhelm Mihajlowski Gallery: Photography is a natural extension of myself

Wilhelm Mikhailovsky was born in 1942. The photographer, free artist. Lives in Riga, Latvia. Since 1976, he has worked for MAKSLA and LITERATURA magazines. Co-publisher and art editor of the BALTIJSKAJA GAZETA weekly during its entire existence 1991-1995 . In 1979, the International Federation of Photographic Art awarded him, the first author from the USSR, the EXCELLENCE EFIAP title.

1. Humanus Series. Inspiration. 1978

– Wilhelm, I remember my feeling from your work, if not from my childhood, then from my early youth: it was above all high art with no presence of the state or the surrounding social environment. Many of my peers learned about photography through your images. What were your first steps in the profession?

– Well, it wasn’t even steps, it was a feeling. I felt I was originally a free man and the freedom of spirit came naturally and easily to me – I had no inner obstacles to overcome. Obviously, it’s from the genus, from my grandmother, because somehow very early on I became savvy and oriented, and many things that one comprehends throughout his life were revealed from the beginning as a given. That’s what I can say now, analyzing, going back to my childhood, because I didn’t bring anything to my foundation in photography or in my attitude to life. It was all laid down.

– Or brought up?

– Trained or imbibed – in any case, everything is from God: both in creativity and in life. I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about anyone in general. I just managed to save my energy and, using that foundation, go, jump, crawl, fly on.

– How did you start taking pictures?? You’re a technician, yes? An ordinary technician..

– Yes, an engineer, and even worked as an engineer. But that’s not important. The important thing is that I remembered a story our housekeeper told me when I was a child: she had gone to the market one day, and the gypsies told her a fortune told that she lived and socialized with a boy who had a great future. Of course, there are a million such stories, but I was left with the feeling, not that I was special, chosen by God, but that I could potentially do something. That was the main core. And then there was a collapse: I suddenly realized that that’s it, I’m a dead man, because I love, I understand, I feel, but professionally I can not express what I care about. I played music, and wrote poetry, and drew, but it wasn’t the same. And so – I’m a techie, I’m already in my thirties, I have nothing behind me, just some inner impulses. Anyway, I had a feeling that my life was over..

– And then..?

– And then my son was born and I had to take his picture, so I had my traditional “point-and-shoot” camera.

– What a “soapbox”? There were no “soapboxes” back then.

– Well, “Change.”. When my son was a year old, I took a picture of the family – my son in his mother’s arms, then all of us together – me, my father, and my son, and then, the next picture, my son in my father’s arms. And this picture, I called it, “What will you be, man??”became my program work. Since then nothing has changed in me as a photographer.

– So from the moment you picked up the camera to the moment this picture came out, it was a few months or a year of your son’s life?

– Yeah!

– You didn’t go to school anywhere?

– I have a technical education, I don’t have an art degree. But I have several academies where I’ve been studying for decades until now: named after Hertz Frank, named after Ojars Vatsietis Latvian people’s poet , named after Lenochka Antimonova graphic artist , named after Vija Artmane. These are my very close, spiritually kindred people, with whom I have a mutual love to the grave. And the least of my worries is, “What am I going to learn?”? “Can I teach them to see that the world is beautiful in all its manifestations.”? – that’s the question. For me.

– And where did you print, develop?

– Printed? My wife and I lived in an unheated room during our first year. We went to bed at night and in the morning the developer was covered with ice. That’s how my first photos were made. The first enlarger, the cheapest one was UP-2. I still use it. I don’t need any others. I measured the developer temperature with my finger, I didn’t have a thermometer. And then you see that the film is black, so you learn. I used to gloss over pictures on the closet door, everything sticks, I peel them off, then I scrape them..

– This picture of the grandfather with his son is the only shot?

– The only one.

– So when you shot it, you didn’t see it? Because otherwise I’d do it again.

– No! A photographer sees more than nature gives us.

– Well, if I saw that I had a great shot, I’d do a few takes? For some reason he took pictures, but for some reason he didn’t notice? I didn’t feel it internally?

– The internal biological computer works out such programs which modern technology and science do not allow to do. I’m amazed: where did it come from?? And scientists are amazed at this, because they still can’t simulate this computer called the brain. We don’t realize the possibilities we have. Because in that creative moment, you live your whole life.

– Yes. But you have to agree that very often it happens that you shoot and you feel: wow, I think I’ve found it! And you repeat it. You have, let’s say, six or ten shots of something on film, and you choose from them. Sometimes you have one shot, and you think it’s great, but there’s nothing around. And why didn’t you notice it, didn’t you try to repeat it??!

– And I can have purely technical failures, for example, in exposure, in sharpness. I’m forced to take takes to back up my technological ignorance. But if it’s happened, I can feel it right away. There was some kind of flash that fixed this image, this state in me. Often you’re wrong… But the very high scores I estimate myself, and subsequently others, have been unmistakable. That is, I haven’t had the kind of thing where I put it off for a long time, and then pulled out a negative and – EVRIKA! Everything happens at once, instantly, like a cosmic flash.

– You have lived and are living in a very photographic city. For the Soviet Union, Riga and Vilnius were the base cities of artistic photography. Has Riga’s photographic life influenced you in any way??

– Of course! I was a member of the Riga photographic club, I came with a photo “What will you be like, a man?” by printing an 18×24 card for the first time. I was accepted. And in the fall, when the summer active season ended for amateur photographers, there was an anonymous exhibition: in the photography club there was such a tradition, when the cards were put up by numbers, and then during the evening they discussed, argued, and expressed their opinions, so it was easier to criticize – not everyone could tell their buddy that his picture was bad. Then, in conclusion, the votes were collected. Everyone wrote on a piece of paper the number of the pictures, votes were cast. And it turned out that mine was the best. And after a while, Gunnar Binde came in. He was making a television program about photography and he picked five or seven pictures by what he thought were different authors, but it turned out that four of the shots he picked were mine. It didn’t happen right away, about a year after I joined the photography club.

– So Binde became the godfather?

– In fact, yes, but ideologically no. We are the most ardent opponents in photography. When we meet now, sparks fly: we are at odds in many ways. We have a very respectful attitude towards each other, but our views are completely different.

– The Riga Photo Club gave me something?

– In the beginning, for a year and a half, when I needed to feel like a real photographer, I filmed in the stadiums and train stations. Then I got bored and sick, because all I could think of was what kind of bar, what kind of paper, what developer, what device, and what lens to use. I was not interested. I was interested in the possibility of developing thought through photography.

– And because of this, that you were interested in “the development of thought through photography,” you went into complicated, technological photography?

– Yes. Because at that moment, I may not have felt reality, the depth of it, my real life was very sparse. I worked, and I used the nights to print, to make it up. My family was developing very rapidly. A son, then a daughter, another son, another son. I have four children I love. And the birth of each of the guys marked a different era for me. The birth of my daughter defined the creation of montage photography.

– Why??

– I don’t know about that! It was just a coincidence. I used to spend several summers with my kids on the beach at the mouth of the Lielupa River, and I used to shoot from the spring to the fall. This is the most picturesque place in Jurmala: the sea, river, forest, children, nature, cleanliness, and the sky which is not perceived as part of space the sky is space itself. And, probably, because of that space, there were amazing movements of thought, which were later embodied in my montages..

– And here is, for example, a photo with the crowd. As she was born? You’d get an idea in your head, or something would happen while you were printing?

– It’s called THE TRANSITION. I nurtured this work for over a year, sensing the internal movement of the amorphous mass of people.

– What year is this??

– The seventy-fifth. In ’74 I could already sense the space of this photograph from within, but it could never be embodied visually. I was shooting, and I had to somehow convey movement. I filmed specifically going into the midst of people, into stadiums, train stations.

– The movement of the crowd was being filmed?

– I tried, yes. But that wasn’t it. And then I found myself in Leningrad in the fall. And here on Nevsky, there are such underpasses, without steps, so smooth..

– Like a stingray.

– Yes! And I felt: this is what I need. Autumn, gloomy. I tried to shoot something, but there was no expression, no dynamics, no movement. In the spring, the next year, I came especially for this shot. I arrived and was just lucky that the movement of light coincided with the movement of the crowd. And I left happy, but I understood that this was only the beginning of my work, because I had to connect the social plot with the universe, to take it out of reality. To create, if you will, a phantasmagoria. But this is not surrealism, I would call it hyper-realism myself.

– Mikhailovsky’s hyper-realism!

– Well, yes..

– He left Leningrad happy, and then there were months spent in the laboratory?

– When I get inflamed, let’s call it that, time stops or extends. I can work around the clock, endlessly. For coffee, without sleep. Reality turns off completely. Then, when everything is done, it takes me a long time to get used to it, to accept the image I’ve found for myself, to admire it..

– There were a lot of them, variants of this picture?

– As a rule, the option is one, there can only be refinements in proportions, in ratios, in tonality, because any photograph, even black and white, is a painting, literally a painting.

– How do you shoot portraits??

– My portrait has nothing to do with montage, in fact it’s a psychological montage… You can take one negative and make a series of portraits, ten portraits, all showing different psychological states.

– Depending on how you print?

– Depending on how I model the space, the architectonics of the face, what elements I bring out: I may hide some things, I may elongate and accentuate others. As a rule, I try to form proportions as soon as I shoot. It’s not a studio shoot, though, because all my portraits are created in a person’s habitat, in their space. I try to use natural light, which is from God. There’s a lot of preparatory work. I see how the light shines, how it’s turned around. I try to find some kind of neutral background.

– The backgrounds you don’t bring with you either? There’s no black velvet hanging?

– No, it could be a brick wall, it could be some small pattern on the wallpaper. I try to make space stand out with sharpness, to blur the background and leave the person one with himself.

– Your portraits are mostly taken with a 6×6 camera?

– Most of it, then I started using a “narrow” camera as well. And that, too, had to be technologically accounted for. But I have mastered the delicate sense of light enough to understand it in the process of shooting and printing – there’s light too, something many people forget about..

– You were always such an artistic photographer, with deep thoughts, with your philosophy, and no one perceived you as a social photographer. And suddenly, your work “Invitation to an Execution”, about the last months of Valery Dolgov’s life, a ruthless and greedy murderer, went off like a clean shot. How is it that all of a sudden you went into a completely different kind of photography?

– It’s not a completely different photograph. Social space is the closest thing to reality and all the time I was filming as an explorer and sometimes as a chronicler of the life around me, trying to use these subjects in my own editing.

And over time, developing a philosophy of montage photography, I learned from the experience of other photographers that everything is in the creative search of course. Any ideology of some local program ends up in you at some point. You reach a certain level, a certain peak of perception and awareness of that space, and then you start repeating yourself. And I was scared to be in that situation. When I was doing montages, I kept trying to look at what was around, and there was portraiture and social photography, and I was developing these programs in parallel.

– But “Invitation to Execution” began when you were invited to be a photographer for a project by documentary filmmaker Hertz Frank?

– Yes, it was Hertz’s idea to make a film about how a person on death row spends his last days, what happens to him and his soul, and what happens to us people around him at the same time. I’m presented as a “photographer” in the credits of the film, but it sounds like a kind of mockery, because it’s not very possible to imagine a photographer on death row..

The film, called “The Supreme Court” 1987 , takes over an hour, and included only a few photographic shots, but they occupy one-seventh of the screen time. When the film was exhausted in movement, when it was impossible to say anything at all, when the words were sticking in my throat, the photograph, the magic of it, its space began to work. The picture holds the unspoken..

– You worked first as a film photographer, and then you had the idea for the book?

– No, I worked as an artist. From the very beginning I had a condition: I allowed myself complete freedom, I wasn’t based on the director’s concept, but I shot the way I saw and perceived

– So you did your own project inside a Hertz Frank film?

– Inside, yes. And I did this work before the film was released. Six months before the picture was finished, I had a ready layout of the book you are holding in your hands now… Valery had all these photos in his hands too – I brought them to him on death row. Moreover, these pictures gave direction to the general thought of the film as well, I think. We entered the cage of the beast at the beginning of the film, seeing him as a murderer, but at the end we saw him as just a sinner..

– Did you know the day he was shot?

– No… It was made official two months after he was gone. But I found out earlier, literally on the second day..

– How?

– That’s how life works. Everyone in Riga knew Valery Dolgov’s story it shocked everyone with the senseless cruelty of the crime. Dolgov, a former student and the son of a prosecutor, robbed an apartment and killed two people, a man and a woman, for which he was sentenced to death. My acquaintance’s son was on an internship at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was preparing accompanying documents.

– The documents for the execution?*

– Yes. And then they called me and said, “You know, they took him away, to the airport, they were sending him by plane.”. It was impossible to hide: special car, uniform, handcuffs..

– So he wasn’t shot in Latvia?

– No, the execution took place in Leningrad.

– Can we say that you and he parted as friends??

– We parted relatives … Because in this mission it was impossible to be from the outside, a colonel or a guard or something else, that is the executor of some position or even a photographer. We had to live everything together with him… Life on death row shook and changed my attitude to everything: life became easier, more understandable, but harder.

– Understandable, but harder?

– More understandable and heavier. I now know a lot of things that those who haven’t lived through it don’t know: let’s say, the awareness of the perishability of the world, and..

– And that there was nothing you could do?

– You can’t do anything, but you can understand a lot.

– Name five great names in photography – for you.

– Philip Halsman, Jerry Welshman, Yusuf Karsh. Three names. And I can feel the energy of their work flowing through me. And at others, you look and see only some kind of plastic.

– We are now discussing whether the number is good or bad. The conversation is basically meaningless, because it’s just an evolutionary leap. In doing so, we realize that people are essentially the same as they were three thousand years ago. What would you wish for those who take their first professional steps and want to live their lives in photography?

– For them to remember that they own not only their eyes, not only their soul, but also their conscience, because conscience is the organizing principle of everything. It prompts us to action, it makes us aware of ourselves as human beings, and all our thoughts are connected to this ephemeral and incomprehensible instrument, which is our strictest censor..

2. Latvia. The CK Elite. 1985

Wilhelm Mikhailovsky: Photography is a natural extension of myself

Wilhelm Michailovsky was born in 1942. Photographer, free artist. Lives in Riga, Latvia. Since 1976, he has worked in the magazines MAKSLA and LITERATURA UN MAKSLA. Co-publisher and art editor of the weekly BALTIJSKAJA GAZETA throughout its existence 1991-1995 . In 1979 the International Federation of Photo Art awarded him, the first author from the USSR, the title EXCELLENCE EFIAP.

In 1987, he co-produced with director Herz Frank the documentary The High Court about the last days in the life of a murderer sentenced to the capital punishment. In 1988 he received the Golden Eye of the World Press Photo for Invitation to Execution. Published 9 photo albums. Organized 54 personal exhibitions in Latvia and abroad between 1976 and 2010. Participated in 300 international photo exhibitions in 50 countries.

His works are in the collections of the Musee Francais de la Photographie: Musée de L’Elysee, Lausanne, and other European collections.

3. Ernst Neizvestny, sculptor. June, 1989

4. From the series “Invitation to Execution…” 1986-1987.

*Last time the death penalty was carried out in America and Latvia was in 1996.

5. Humanus Series. Morning for my girl. 1975

6. What are you to be, a human being? 1969

7. Before the Communion. August 29, 2007.

8. Gypsy Idyll. 1986

9. Humanus series. Reconstruction VII. 1976

Photo: Wilhelm Mihailovsky