Fotograf Magazine

Starting from the 1970s, Kharkiv – a city in Eastern Ukraine – became one of the first centres of a photographic revolution. Borys Mykhailov, Sergey Solonskyi, Sergey Bratkov, Eugeniy Pavlov, Oleg Maliovanyi and many others were photographers who went against the governmental aesthetics and developed new rules of the game – experimentation, boldness, self-expression, social realism, and synthesis with other artistic media. They thus initiated a phenomenon called the “Kharkiv school of photography.” Their activity does not have a direct impact on the development of new authors, yet influences the formation of visual speech and lays down a basis for new experiments.