Intimate Resistance: The Kharkiv School of Photography and the Politics of the Body in Late Soviet Ukraine, 1971–1988

This article explores how early Kharkiv School of Photography (KSOP) artists used the domains of intimacy and sexuality to push the boundaries of artistic innovation in late Soviet Ukraine. I focus particularly on the photography of Boris Mikhailov, Juri Rupin, Evgeniy Pavlov and Roman Pyatkovka, whose subversive representations of nudity, sexuality and childbirth in the 1970s and 1980s express an erotic visual language of resistance to state symbology and propaganda. In so doing, I include KSOP as part of Ukraine's cultural 'unmaking' of state socialism, reframing it as a gendered and sexual project — one that 're-formed' bodies and identities in opposition to Soviet hegemony.