Sergey Bratkov

From Vremya and Boris Mikhailov to Gosprom—The Second Generation of Kharkiv Photography

Before Bratkov, 1970s Kharkiv saw the Vremya group—among them Boris Mikhailov—photograph nudity, derelict outskirts, alcohol, desire, and contradictions within propaganda that Soviet official photography excluded. They also used superimposition, hand-coloring, collage, and other interventions against Socialist Realist norms. Research on the Kharkiv School of Photography published by the Ukrainian Institute argues that censorship and restricted access to Western photographic developments encouraged local experiments outside established photographic conventions^*20. Bratkov joined the next generation through the Gosprom group in 1987, moving across photography, painting, graphics, and collage during the 1980s^*6. His roughness and irregular compositions therefore did not suddenly appear in the 1990s as a “post-Soviet style.” They grew from a Kharkiv photographic culture that had already distrusted the smoothness of official images, then carried that distrust into a new visual environment saturated with advertising, commodities, and class markers after the Soviet collapse.

Fast Reaction Group—Collaborative Work Responding to Events After the Soviet Collapse

Some sources date the beginning of the Fast Reaction Group to 1993, with activity by Bratkov, Boris Mikhailov, Sergey Solonsky, and Vita/Victoria Mikhailova clearly documented by 1994. Art Focus Now records the group’s formation in 1993 and activity at the Kharkiv Art Museum the following year^*16. Galerie Transit and the Kyiv Biennial give 1994–97 as its principal period of activity^*9. The collaborative series If I Were a German (1994) brought the Kharkiv tradition of staging, self-performance, and political provocation into the conditions that followed the Soviet collapse. The Kyiv Biennial documents the group’s membership during this period as well as its photographic series, objects, and provocative campaigns^*8. Bratkov later recalled that social change in the early 1990s moved so quickly that photography could respond to the moment faster than studio painting^*16. His movement among photography, staging, and action developed amid a city in which advertising, clothing, commodities, and bodily gestures were changing at high speed.

An Emotionally Withheld Camera and the Idea of “Making Sculpture from a Photograph”

A statement published by Museum AZ gives one of the clearest accounts of Bratkov’s method. He says he wants to make a painting from a photograph, and even more “a sculpture,” because photography can convey form, volume, and mass; he also describes deliberately withholding emotion and avoiding overly explicit compositions^*1. The point is not simply a desire to turn photographs into three-dimensional objects. It indicates a wish to let bodies, clothing, architecture, dirt, and color collide on a single surface instead of resolving social problems into explanatory statements. e-flux’s retrospective material similarly presents his portraits as consensual encounters in which the remains of Soviet order and new forms of capitalist display appear within the same society^*7. For Bratkov, photography is powerful because it can record on the surface of actual bodies the clothes, poses, and desires that people in a given historical moment already wear and perform. Adding staging to that record allows the subject to reenact the image society has already assigned to them.

Birds—Placing Orphanage Children and Taxidermied Birds in the Same Sequence

The 1997 series Birds alternates photographs of children from an orphanage with taxidermied birds in a natural-history museum. KOHTA, in a later presentation of the work, reads the series against the deterioration of social institutions after the Soviet collapse and the conditions faced by those meant to be protected by them^*3. Its force comes less from turning the children into emotionally enlarged symbols of tragedy than from placing portraits and specimen photographs within the same cool visual sequence. Observation and editorial construction remain inseparable. The series shifts from using photography as evidence of “unfortunate children” toward asking how a society classifies and positions human beings.

Kids—Fashion Poses and Ethical Discomfort

In the 2000 series Kids, children wear clothing and assume poses that evoke adult fashion advertising and sexualized self-presentation. Pinault Collection’s account of Zhenya notes the discomfort produced by these adult-coded gestures^*11. e-flux places Kids alongside Soldiers, Secretaries, Army Girls, and related portraits in which the promise of individualization after the Soviet collapse intersects with new capitalist forms of display^*7. Photography is crucial to the work. An essay can criticize the sexual and class codes of advertising from a distance; here actual children perform those gestures before the camera, and the resulting images retain the clarity of fashion photography. The work cannot be cleanly separated from what it critiques. If Bratkov merely denounced consumer culture from outside it, the ethical discomfort would be different. By photographing the moment when a person physically performs the market’s image of how one should appear, the series asks how deeply new post-Soviet visual norms had entered behavior, while simultaneously raising questions about the ethics of making the photograph itself.

Combining Observational Photography and Staged Portraiture—Photographing Society’s Self-Staging

Bratkov’s series include people encountered on the street as well as overtly staged portraits. The first generation of Kharkiv photographers challenged official photographic norms with superimposition, hand-coloring, and forbidden subjects; the generation after Gosprom inherited that experimental language while mixing documentary, staging, collage, and performance^*20. Research on Kharkiv photography published by DutchCulture likewise argues that montage and layered images disrupted the mimetic realism of official photography and remained important through the Fast Reaction Group’s If I Were a German in the 1990s^*21. For Bratkov, staging is not simply the opposite of documentary. Under the Soviet system, the state prescribed how workers and heroes should appear in official images; in post-Soviet society, advertising, television, and class-coded behavior supplied new models of appearance. Observational photographs can record people who have already absorbed those codes. Staged portraits such as Kids deliberately exaggerate them and ask subjects to perform them again. Placing found reality and constructed reality within the same photographic body of work makes it difficult to decide how much society itself has already been staged. That ambiguity is central to Bratkov’s critique of post-Soviet visual culture.

My Moscow and the Urban Panorama

e-flux records that Bratkov was based in Moscow from 2000^*7. After the move, urban wealth, consumption, and class difference became increasingly prominent subjects. PinchukArtCentre traces his international exhibition history while noting the continued significance of his Kharkiv background^*14. A retrospective exhibition at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg linked older work to projects made after 2022, reconsidering changing conditions of urban life, family, and war through photography and video^*5. Even in his urban work, Bratkov does not isolate architecture as orderly form. People, signs, commodities, cars, and color accumulate within the same frame, resisting any neat diagram of a society in transition.

Photography, Video, and Installation—Giving Images “Mass”

As Museum AZ notes, Bratkov has not treated the photograph as an isolated print; he has integrated photography with performance and installation^*1. Fotomuseum Winterthur’s Glory Days likewise presented him across photography, video, and installation^*4. Galerie Volker Diehl’s biographical material documents photographic series developing in parallel with video and exhibition projects^*17, while Ovcharenko’s 2004 exhibition Seven presented post-Kids work through combinations of photography and installation^*18. Print scale, seriality, walls, and the duration of moving images allow him to work with pressure produced by repetition and accumulation, not simply with the information contained in a single photograph.

International Reception and a Complex Ukrainian/Russian Trajectory

Bratkov participated in the 2002 São Paulo Biennial and the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, among other international exhibitions, and was widely presented as an important figure in post-Soviet photography^*14. The photography-now archive records a 2008 retrospective, Glory Days, at Fotomuseum Winterthur and includes exhibition material on works such as Kids^*19. Kunstkritikk discusses the 2022 exhibition Harkova/Moskova as an opportunity to reread Kharkiv and Moscow, the early Kids series, and later works together^*13. The Kyiv Biennial 2025 likewise situates him as a Kharkiv-born artist within later narratives of Ukrainian art^*8. His long period of activity in Russia and his Ukrainian origins should not be collapsed into a simple national story; the more revealing history lies in how changing cities and institutions altered the subjects of his work.

The Ethics of Photographing Social Vulnerability—Distance Is No Alibi

Because Bratkov photographs orphans, unhoused people, sexualized bodies, workers, and others in vulnerable social positions, the gaze that brings marginal lives into art must itself remain open to criticism. Pinault Collection places the discomfort of Kids at the center of its interpretation^*10. Frieze also records how the series was received as scandalous at Regina Gallery in 2001^*12. An emotionally withheld camera does not erase the power imbalance between photographer and subject. The series remains contentious because it holds two effects together: it resists converting social violence into a sentimental story of rescue, yet it also risks treating the subject as formal material.

After 2022—Rereading the “Post-Soviet” Past from Wartime

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Bratkov moved to Germany and made works concerning his native Kharkiv, his family, and the war. Art Focus Now reports on his work after relocating to Berlin and on how earlier Kharkiv photographs acquired different meanings under new historical conditions^*16. Schloss Wiepersdorf likewise describes his continuing engagement with social reality through photography, video, and installation^*15. Writing on his 2024 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Art Focus Now describes a presentation in which war reconnects recent and earlier works^*2. Bratkov’s place in photographic history therefore extends beyond the label of an artist who photographed the strange realities of the post-Soviet world. By mixing documentary and staging and seeking a sculptural density in photographs, he presents periods of social transition as visual fields in which contradiction remains unresolved rather than as explanatory diagrams.