Challenging the borders of intermediality studies: Boris Mikhailov’s “Unfinished Dissertation”

Boris Mikhailov is a prominent representative of the Kharkiv School of Photography. This school was a heterogeneous artistic movement that, starting in the 1970s, challenged the paradisical image imposed by the regime’s propaganda and showed real and grotesque facets of Soviet life using new photographic techniques. The publication of Mikhailov’s “Unfinished Dissertation” in 1984 brought the Kharkiv movement to a higher level of theoretical self-awareness. Photographs of everyday life, philosophical quotations and reflections, along with humorous statements, are combined in a cryptical way, reflecting the atmosphere of bleak untimeliness of the late Soviet era. Like “Camera lucida” by Roland Barthes, “Unfinished Dissertation” is both an intimate diary consisting of personal photographs and an essayistic attempt to grasp the essence of photography. This contribution approaches the work as one of the crucial iconotexts of the 20th century, analysing both its cultural relevance and the non-illustrative interplay of text and pictures.