Plate No 48 from the “Yesterday’s Sandwich” series © Boris Mikhailov

“This image was part of a series I put together in 2006 called Yesterday’s Sandwich, in which two pictures from the past were combined. My friends have been superimposed over a photograph of a poster I saw in town at that time. I don’t remember what it was for, but it was probably advertising a demo or an important communist, as all posters at that time were ideological. Valera is holding the racket like a fighter bearing a sword. That’s why the shot reminds me of the final verse of my favourite Oscar Wilde poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I think of it as my poem:

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,  

Some do it with a bitter look,  

Some with a flattering word,  

The coward does it with a kiss,  

The brave man with a sword!  

For me, everything started with this shot. I felt like an artist for the first time in my life.” - Boris Mikhailov 

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