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Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

From the press photos I wasn’t anticipating too much but ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ turns out to be a really interesting and rewarding exhibition, fully deserving the two floors of gallery space given over to it.

First room of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

One of the problems is the promotion web pages and images just show one photo at a time and some of them look a bit meh, don’t feel that good, as a group they don’t add up to a unified look’ etc. It’s only when you get to the exhibition that you realise a number of key facts which transform your understanding.

1. Amateur Boris Mikhailov got into photography by accident, had no formal training, and so was free to invent and make things up. A lot of these innovations are really interesting.

2. Articulate Mikhailov is a very good explainer of his own work, so the wall labels which explain it are not only informative but his explanations of his innovations are unusually inspiring and interesting.

3. Bad photography One of these was the simple idea of bad photography. In the Soviet Union photography was a profession like any other, heavily controlled by the state with approved styles and qualities to promote uplifting images of perfect life in the workers’ state.

Mikhailov opened up a whole new world when he realised that bad, out of focus, poorly framed, damaged images were themselves a valid aesthetic, and a political statement. Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were, he realised, the appropriate response to the shabby reality of Soviet life: ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’. This explains why some of the images, when seen in isolation on a web page are only meh, whereas seen en masse, and accompanied by an eloquent explanation, they gain so much more power.

4. Sets It also explains why Mikhailov’s images are conceived and designed to be seen in sets and the sets don’t just represent a new subject, but the best of them embody an entirely new technique and way of thinking about photography. As he explains:

‘The idea that a single picture contains maximum information is a lie; I don’t believe in absolute truth. Exploring something from many different angles gives you a heightened sense of the truth. I need the sum of the images, the sum of the sequences in order to cast doubt on the correctness of one single, possible perception. The vibration between the images expands their possibilities.’

Biography

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. He took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene.

His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series ‘Case History’, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine. Having learned of him via his post-USSR collapse photos, Western fans were then able to go back and review his subversive works from the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition presents the complete body of his work in chronological order.

‘Ukrainian Diary’ brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including:

Slideshow: Yesterday’s Sandwich (mid-’60s to 1970s)

One day he threw a couple of slides onto his bed and they stuck together. When he held the stuck slides up to the light he realised they made a dramatically surreal image and hence was born the series ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich’. As he experimented with the technique he realised the juxtaposition of random images could be thought of as reflecting the dualism and contradictions of Soviet society.

His commentary is fascinating. He explains that the 60s and 70s were a time, in all the countries of the Soviet bloc, of hidden messages and secret codes. No-one took official propaganda seriously but all organs of free expression were ruthlessly suppressed. Hence codes and secret signs and hidden allusions. In actual fact no particular ‘message’ emerges from these images except a surreal subversion of the normal, logical, sensible everyday world.

Nearly 100 of these wonderfully funny, crazy, surreal images are here displayed as a slideshow projected onto the wall of a darkened space in the gallery. For some reason they are displayed to a severely edited version of the classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon’ which Mikhailov considers an ‘exaggeration of beauty’ conveying a kind of ‘paradise lost’. It makes it an even more surreal experience, watching images from a distant and vanished society accompanied by such a familiar homely soundtrack.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the composite images in the Yesterday’s Sandwich slideshow (photo by the author)

Black Archive (1968 to 1979)

‘Black Archive’ documents everyday life in Kharkiv, often revealing the disparity between public life and private life in domestic spaces. Under Soviet rule it was forbidden to photograph everyday life and so Mikhailov was forced to hide his camera in order to take furtive snapshots, often taken from behind and at odd angles. By contrast, the private sphere of people’s apartments was a space of freedom, most vividly expressed in the carefree nudity of many of his subjects.

But in the series Mikhailov also deploys his concept of ‘bad photography’— the deliberate production of sloppily printed, blurred, and low-contrast images full of visible flaws — as a metaphor and a tool for social critique.

Red (1968 to 1978)

The set ‘Red’ brings together more than 70 images taken in Kharkiv in the late 1960s and 1970s, all of which contain the colour red. From the wall labels we learn that red was a powerful symbol of the Russian Revolution (1917) and of the Soviet Union (1922 to 1991). Its presence in these varied photos indicates the extent to which communist ideology saturated everyday life. As usual Mikhailov explains all this in his vivid and fascinating way:

‘The word “red” in Russian has the same root as the word for beauty, it also means revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associated red with communism. But few people realised that red had permeated all our lives. Demonstrations and parades are an important part of this series. It’s a place where one of the main images of Soviet propaganda—the face of happy Soviet life, secure in its future—was created. They became absolutely kitschy and vulgar… I sometimes felt that I was surrounded by a herd of cynics, victims, and fools, followed by people wearing red ribbons as if they were policemen. As if the regime was using the people’s desire to celebrate for its own ends. And it was important to me to photograph them in such a way that you could tell the “Soviet” from the “human”.’

From the series ‘Red’ by Boris Mikhailov (1968-75) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portraits) (1971 to 1985)

After losing his job as an engineer, Mikhailov managed to make a living as a commercial photographer, sometimes working on the black market, enlarging, retouching, and hand-colouring snapshots of weddings, newborns or family members lost in the war.

In what is considered the first use of found material in contemporary Soviet photography, Mikhailov then appropriated and reworked these manipulated photographs for his own practice. Often using vibrant or exaggerated colours, he made them more ‘beautiful’, staying within the law while simultaneously mocking the way Soviet propaganda glorified mundane events.

By means of these simple techniques, Luriki comically undermined the absurdity of the iconography of Soviet life. Grouped together, the pictures are like a Soviet family album, a collection of surreal, ridiculous situations.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the Luriki images (photo by the author)

Dance (1978)

Apparently open-air dancing was a popular activity in Soviet Kharkiv. Mikhailov has a lovely set depicting people of all ages, sizes and shape, in 1970s Soviet clothes, sedately dancing, quite often women dancing with other women.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Dance photos (photo by the author)

Series of Four (early 1980s)

One wall is covered with these images grouped into sets of four. This came about by accident. Mikhailov set out to wander the streets of Kharkiv and take photos of nothing, of non-events, designed to capture the boredom and emptiness of Soviet life. But when he came to make contact prints he realised he didn’t have small-format paper so he put four images together on one sheet. At a stroke he realised he’d created something: the multiple points of view of the same scene creates complex effects. Suddenly a boring scene becomes part of a fragmented, multi-angled world. Presented in this way, they can also have a cinematic effect, telling a story in snapshots. And another effect is to create out of a mundane non-space a kind of cocoon, creating a compression of space, imbuing an anonymous nowhere with strange fugitive meanings.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Series of Four photos (photo by the author)

Crimean Snobbism (1982)

Mikhailov went to Gursuf, a seaside resort on the Crimean Peninsula and took portraits of himself, wife and friends frolicking by the seaside, adopting holiday poses etc. As with many of his sets, Mikhailov gave them a sepia tone, making them feel historic and detached from the present, and also suggesting their subversive intent. Because the entire set is intended as a parody of the kind of carefree, bourgeois lifestyle then associated with ‘the West’ and far beyond the reach of your average Ukrainian citizen, and which he satirises in phrases: ‘We’re so happy. We’re so beautiful. We’re so in love etc’.

Viscidity (1982)

In another interesting experiment, in the early 1980s Mikhailov started combining text and image together in a conceptual way: he glued his photographs carelessly onto sheets of paper, then scribbled thoughts—banal, poetic, or philosophical—in the margins. His fragmentary thoughts were not intended as captions, nor to illustrate or elucidate the photographs; they were often utterly unrelated to them and intended to be equally important, a composite reflection on the social stagnation of the Soviet Union.

‘Viscidity’ is the word he used to describe the period the country was living through at the time — ‘a peaceful, quiet, featureless, dull life, a time of deep political stagnation, a frozen day-to-dayness. There was no catharsis, no nostalgia, just grey, everyday life. Nothing was happening, nothing was at all interesting.’ Hence ‘lousy photographs with these lousy texts’, ‘unchanging ordinariness and timelessness.’

Unfinished dissertation (1984-5)

On the back of the tattered pages of a stranger’s university dissertation found in a rubbish bin, Mikhailov pasted poorly printed black-and-white photos of inconsequential moments and then jotted down his thoughts about art and life in the margins. The photos don’t synch with the text, neither shedding light on each other, except obliquely.

Salt Lake (1986)

Mikhailov’s father used to tell him about a salt lake in southern Ukraine where people went to bathe in the 1920s and ’30s, believing that the warm, salty water had healing properties. When Mikhailov went to visit himself he found the crowds of people on the beach near to a disused old factory, washing themselves in the factory pipes and smearing themselves with mud.

He found it ‘the quintessence of an average person’s life in the Soviet context. Despite the horrible, polluted, inhuman environment, the people were relaxed, calm, and happy.’ To the modern Western ye, this looks like a gallery of grotesques in a grim, squalid environment.

Later Mikhailov toned his images sepia, like photographs from another era and explains: ‘There was a kind of an interplay there, a fusion between the old and the new. Old, because it was something my father had seen, and at the same time a reality that still existed… An elaboration of an idea I’d explored before: we’re both there and not there, it’s both today and a long time ago.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Salt Lake photos (photo by the author)

By The Ground (1991)

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mikhailov took to the streets with his panoramic camera slung low around his waist. While the panoramic format is conventionally used for sweeping vistas and beautiful landscapes Mikhailov captured bleak street scenes which captured the shabby poverty of the streets.

Mikhailov also devised a protocol for installing the series: the prints are hung low on the wall, forcing the viewer to stoop down to see the images, as if to bring us closer to his subjects. As with previous sets, he also treated the images, toning the silver prints brown, imbuing them images with a sense of nostalgia. As always his own comments on his process are fascinating:

‘I “aged” the images by toning them in sepia… embedding the photos in layers of time to trigger parallel, photo-historical associations, to show that photography has become as elusive as existence itself.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the By The Ground wide-angle photos (photo by the author)

I am not I (1992)

A series of nude self portraits in which Mikhailov parodies traditional masculine stereotypes. The stereotypes he mocks are those promoted by the recently collapsed USSR but they are also recognisable as American stereotypes too. Thus he photographs himself in a range of comic or demeaning poses, wearing an absurd curly wig, holding a toy sword or, most strikingly, an artificial phallus. Like all the sets, these gain in meaning and humour when you see 20 variations next to each other.

From the series ‘I am not I’ by Boris Mikhailov (1992) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Green (1991 to 1993)

In the early 1990s Mikhailov produced a series of hand-coloured photographs known as the ‘Green’ series. The images are suffused with a lingering, toxic green tint to reflect the environmental decay and societal collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union. The series is represented here by a monumental triptych showing a decaying junkyard in an overgrown landscape. The colour green has a particular resonance for Mikhailov who says it is the colour of a swamp and indicates the moss which had grown on Soviet life, a metaphor for Soviet decay.

In earlier sets he had had photographed people living in poverty, drug addiction and social degradation using a disposable camera and cheap gelatin silver paper to evoke awkwardness and fragility. Here, he takes the concept further, using stains and drips of paint on the thin, crumpled paper as if to embody the worn, impoverished landscape and lives he saw around him.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing ‘Green’ (photo by the author)

At Dusk (1993)

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union Mikhailov wandered the streets of Kharkiv with a swing-lens camera that took in a 120-degree panoramic view, capturing the life of destitute people on the streets. He tinted all the images a heavy cobalt blue. Why? Several reasons: the colour (along with the title) indicate the transition from day to night. But blue also represents his boyhood memories of the Second World War, of fleeing with his mother on one of the last freight trains out of Kharkiv to escape the Nazi advance. Blue, he explains, is the colour of blockade, hunger and war. Tinting these images of street people the same colour a) indicates the severity of the crisis of poverty which hit his country and b) also produces images of intense and haunting beauty.

From the series ‘At Dusk’ by Boris Mikhailov (1993) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Case History (1997 to 98)

A few years after the collapse of communism, Mikhailov realised that in his hometown of Kharkiv, not only had a new ruling elite of millionaires emerged, but a significant part of the population had also been plunged into poverty. The mid-1990s produced a new group of people, the bomzhes or homeless.

So Mikhailov set about photographing these pitiful people, right at the bottom of society. He produced a series of 400 raw portraits. As with other sets, he deliberately transgressed the codes of photojournalism by paying his subjects, and he and his wife Vita also often offered them hot meals in exchange for posing. Some of the poses are stage in the manner of the Pietà or the Descent from the Cross.

This exhibition shows one image of one abject couple blown up on the wall and a display case of 100 small test prints from his archive. They are pitiful to look at.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing the one blown-up image and 100 test prints from ‘Case Study’ (photo by the author)

Reflecting on these images the next day, I realised that their abjectness is emphasised by their nudity. What I mean is that, unless you have a buff toned body, most of us already look a bit embarrassing when naked and caught in everyday postures, in the shower, getting out of bed etc. Many (half?) of the shots in the Case History exacerbate the poverty and squalor of the subjects by showing old, ugly, maimed or ill people, naked or half-clothed. What I’m trying to convey is how this nudity powerfully amplifies the general air of degradation and humiliation.

The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013 to 2014)

Euromaidan or the Maidan Uprising was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden decision not to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU but Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it.

In late December 2013 Boris and Vita Mikhailov documented the protests, photographing protestors who had pitched their tents in the central square in Kyiv. Mikhailov comments that the situation was so tense that scenes felt like they had been staged. ‘The bonfires, the colours, the lights, the people sitting there exhausted — everything created a general feeling of tension. It was unclear how it would all end.’

The protests succeeded in forcing President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia but soon afterwards, on 27 February 2014, Russian forces occupied the Crimea, starting the Russo-Ukrainian War which continues to this day.

Thoughts

Many of Mikhailov’s images are very strong in their own right, and display adeptness in an extraordinary range of styles, from the photojournalism of Salt Lake to the nostalgic surrealism of Yesterday’s Sandwich, the warlike intensity of the At Dusk series to the blistering poverty porn of the miserable Case Histories.

But as well as the appeal of individual images, or the impact of specific sets, the exhibition as a whole builds up into a powerful portrait of life in a Soviet state – to the shabby, unhealthy, stiflingly boring nature of life under communism – and then after 1990, to the catastrophic collapse in living standards for large swathes of the population in post-Soviet society.

It’s not only an impressive body of work by a consistently inventive and innovative artist, but a powerful portrait and indictment of life in Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Video

This is not the usual 30-second exhibition promotional video but an extended, 14-minute-long interview with Mikhailov which really brings over how articulate and interesting he is.

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Posted by Simon on January 12, 2026

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Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline by Anastasia Taylor-Lind @ Imperial War Museum London

The Imperial War Museum London is hosting a free exhibition of photos taken in the Ukraine by internationally renowned photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind from the Ukraine. It’s a smallish display, in just one room, of 17 big colour photos.

Maybe the Ukraine came to most people’s notice with Russia’s invasion of 24 February 2022. But something like that doesn’t come out of the blue and in fact Ukraine has been in a low-level war since 2014, the year when a complex political crisis in Ukraine came to a head. This explains why the exhibition is divided into three parts or ‘moments’ and 2014 is the first one:

1. 2014 protests (3 photos)

Background

In 2013 the Ukrainian parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalising a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), something which marked a decisive shift away from its eastern neighbour, Russia. Russia, for its part, offered Ukraine very favourable trading arrangements, large state loans and brought political pressure to bear on Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych who, as a result, at the end of 2013 abruptly cancelled the negotiations with the EU and reaffirmed Ukraine’s economic and political ties with Russia.

This led to huge pro-EU protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities which turned into violent clashes between protestors and security forces. Government buildings were occupied, there were running street battles, in all over 100 protesters were killed and over 1,000 injured. The protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption and abuse of power, the influence of oligarchs, police brutality, and human rights violations. A large, barricaded protest camp occupied Independence Square in central Kyiv throughout the ‘Maidan Uprising’.

Eventually a bill was introduced into Parliament stripping Yanukovych of the presidency and a few days later another one called for his arrest. He fled to the Russified east of the country. This demonstration of people power came to be referred to as the Revolution of Dignity or the Maidan Revolution.

Photos

Taylor-Lind was in Kiev during the Maidan Revolution and took some cracking photos, in fact the single best image from the exhibition captures the messy defiance of protesters swarming over some grand statuary in central Kiev while thick black smoke from burning tyres gives the scene an apocalyptic vibe.

Anti-government protests, Kyiv, February 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

The 17 photos in the exhibition can perhaps be sorted into 3 or so categories: one is actuality, snapped on the hoof, as it appears, such as the image above. A completely different type is the photographs Taylor-Lind took in the makeshift studio she created which could be quickly set up in trouble spots. She rigged one up in central Kiev during the revolution and spend weeks photographing hundreds of protesters, including tired, injured Yevhen Shulga.

Yevhen Shulga, Kiev 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

There are four of these ‘studio’ portraits in the show and, interestingly enough, one of the other three is also of Shulga, but from 2022, showing his transformation from street protester to fully-fledged soldier in the Ukraine Army.

2. 2014 to 2020 the Donbas (4 photos)

Unfortunately, overthrowing an unpopular president wasn’t the end of it, the Maidan Revolution wasn’t as decisive or final as the overthrow of communism had been in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the other Eastern bloc countries 25 years earlier.

Ukraine’s situation is complicated and the war doesn’t make any sense unless you listen to the Russian side. The Russians have a number of grievances. Number one, in deep history, Kiev is actually the spiritual home of the Russian Orthodox Church, for it was here, in 987, that the Kievan Prince Vladimir married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor and concerted, along with all his subjects, to the Orthodox religion. To quote Michael Ignatieff’s excellent study of modern nationalism, ‘Kievan Rus is the beginning of the Russian nationalist experience’ (Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff, 1993, page 87). So there’s a deep Russian nationalistic claim to the capital.

During the nineteenth century the Ukraine was fully incorporated into the Russian Empire and the eastern part of the country heavily settled by Russian speakers. As a result of the Russian Revolution the aristocracy fed and the middle classes expropriated of their land. Between the wars Stalin pushed through the forced collectivisation of the vast fertile farms of central Ukraine and this led to one of the biggest man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, when as many as 5 million Ukrainians starved to death between 1931 and 1933. The Russians also attempted to exterminate the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

This explains why, when the Nazis invaded as part of their attack on the USSR in June 1941, they were at first greeted as liberators from the yoke of the murderous, semi-genocidal Soviet regime, at least until it became clear that the Nazis were even worse. The whole brutal period is described in Timothy Snyder’s often stomach-churning book.

So Ukrainian nationalists, predominantly in the west of the country, found themselves fighting a three-way war, against the Soviets and against the Nazis and, a few years later, when the resurgent Red Army pressed the Germans back through the Ukraine, many nationalists fought the Russians. In fact Ignatieff says that some nationalist guerrilla forces weren’t completely neutralised until the 1950s. Ukrainian nationalists may remember these forces as heroes but the Russians, of course, lump them together with the Nazi enemy and this gives them a veneer of plausibility when Russian propaganda paints anyone who opposes Moscow’s wishes, right up to the present day, as ‘fascists’.

Back to 2014 and Russia didn’t take the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych lying down. Within a matter of weeks two things happened:

  1. Russia annexed the Crimea
  2. Russia sent paramilitary forces to bolster armed uprisings in the far east of Ukraine, on the Russian border

Bucha, April 2022 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

1. The annexation of the Crimea

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This in-depth article gives the reasons why.

In summary, 1) the Russians had only just finished managing a violent little civil war in the newly annexed western regions of Ukraine, especially Volynia and Galicia; 2) the new Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had himself been head of the CP of Ukraine and knew the republic well; 3) in the 1950s the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian.

In other words, assigning the Crimea to the Ukraine added nearly a million ethnic Russians to the troublesome Republic. It was a swift, administrative way of increasing the Russian minority in the country.

The downside was that the Crimea is host to Russia’s Black Sea ports and navy. This didn’t matter so long as Ukraine was under the thumb of Russia within the USSR. But amid the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear to the Russian military (Navy) that handing over Russia’s main Black Sea naval base to a different country was crazy. The status of the Crimean bases remained a source of controversy and tension throughout the 1990s, with Boris Yeltsin and successive leaders negotiating leasing and access deals.

In a way it’s a surprise that a leader as increasingly bullish and nationalistic as Vladimir Putin took until 2014 to annex the Crimea. You can see why, from his point of view, if Ukraine had remained under Yanukovych who would have been cemented to Russia by favourable trade deals, then Putin and the Russian military would have let the negotiated arrangements about Crimea continue; but how, when Yanukovych was overthrown, and the Ukraine parliament made clear its commitment to ally with the West, Putin and the Generals acted.

According to the 2014 census, Crimea had a population of 2.3 million, of whom 68% were Russian and 16% were Ukrainian. So although many in the West and international fora like the UN disapproved of the annexation, you can see both the a) military and b) ethnically nationalist thinking behind the move.

2. The Donbas

Back to the exhibition, the second consequence of the overthrow of President Yanukovych was that Russia supported rebellions against Ukraine’s government in areas along the border. I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

In March 2014, following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, anti-revolution and pro-Russian protests began in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, collectively ‘the Donbas’. These began as Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Armed Russian-backed separatists seized Ukrainian government buildings in the Donbas and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk republics (DPR and LPR) as independent states, leading to conflict with Ukrainian government forces. Russia covertly supported the separatists with troops and weaponry, only later admitting sending “military specialists”. After a year of fighting, the conflict developed into trench warfare. There were 29 failed ceasefires. About 14,000 people were killed in the war: 6,500 pro-Russian separatist and Russian forces, 4,400 Ukrainian forces, and 3,400 civilians on both sides of the frontline. The vast majority of civilian casualties were in the first year.

Apparently, the conflict was very fierce in 2014 and 15 but then settled down to First World War-style trenches and attrition.

The exhibition includes four photos to cover this prolonged conflict. I mentioned categories of photos, above. The best photo here is an example of a hybrid form, which is posed, but not as posed as a studio photo. This, for me, is arguably the best image in the show.

A Ukrainian soldier, Donbas, 2018 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

At first I thought this was an interior, and the backdrop was some kind of old wood panelling, fitting for a comfy sofa and a framed oil painting. Only when I looked more closely did I realise that the ‘wall’ is made from a big stack of army ammunition boxes. In fact the wall label explains that the whole thing was set up under a bridge and completely outside. When you look closer you can see the sofa is a bit of old tat with rips in it and the painting is a cheap reproduction in a chipped frame.

So the whole thing represents a complex attempt to recreate the comforts of home in a war zone but is by way of being a sort of trompe l’oeil fabrication which, at the same time, beautifully captures the spirit of invention and blagging which characterises all front lines.

3. Spring 2022 Russian invasion (10 photos)

The third and largest part of the little exhibition contains 10 photos covering aspects of Russia’s invasion of the whole of Ukraine which started on 24 February 2022. By now you can see that this attack didn’t come out of the blue but had deep historical, cultural, political and military roots.

But if annexing the Crimea could, possibly, be justified by ethnic nationalism and politics, a full-scale attack on an independent nation state is clearly in breach of the United Nations charter and international law. It’s has been deplored by the International Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, and the International Criminal Court.

There’s widespread consensus (in the West, at any rate) that Putin intended his forces to mount a pincer movement on Kiev and seize it within a week, presumably intending to force the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy into exile, whereupon the Russians could impose their own Russia-friendly government and then hold some kind of rigged referendum or plebiscite. Their playbook really hasn’t changed since the deepest communist days of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

The most obvious thing about the war is it has revealed how rubbish the Russian army is. Despite the element of surprise and overwhelming superiority of numbers, their advances got bogged down on all fronts. As usual, their leadership was bad and the quality of the average Russian squaddie very poor. Discipline was bad, units fell apart, equipment was inferior to Ukraine’s western kit.

For humanitarians like Taylor-Lind and the IWM the focus is less on the historical and military roots than on the humanitarian tragedy the invasion has triggered. These 10 photos come from spring 2022 i.e. three or four months into the present conflict, and show: a grieving mother; one of Taylor-Lind’s makeshift studio portraits of two adult sisters who have fled the fighting and are now refugees; an older lady taking receipt of a coal delivery (since all the gas pipelines have been blown up).

There’s the shot of the back of a middle-aged woman receiving hospital treatment after a shell exploded in her back garden; there’s a sick old woman with a name tag tied to her wrist who’s being evacuated from a hospital near the front line. There’s a shot of four soldiers digging a defensive trench and another of five soldiers firing a volley over the grave of a local farmer.

There’s a mass grave being excavated at Bucha where the Russians are alleged to have carried out atrocities against civilians, tying their hands behind their backs, torturing them, executing them – a grim roll-call which recalls the behaviour of the Serbs during the Yugoslav Civil wars 30 years ago.

The brutal nature of this kind of hybrid warfare, with its paramilitaries and mercenaries, with its badly-disciplined troops encouraged by their officers to spread terror, hasn’t changed or evolved. Like a plague, like a scourge of God, it just visits different areas and leaves grieving relatives, burned out houses and mass graves. Above all it leaves destruction on an epic scale, and this is the fourth category of photo I’d identify in the exhibition – unpeopled ruins.

A damaged apartment block, Sumy region, April 2022 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

It’s not so much the deaths which appal me, it’s the unremitting, pointless, futile, death-drive destruction and devastation which forces like the Russians or the 1990s Serbs inflicted everywhere they went. Too weak, badly led and indisciplined to actually win battles, these forces nonetheless have the resources to destroy, mindlessly, pointless, for days and weeks and months, destroying home and offices, infrastructure, power plants, water. If they can’t have it, no-one can. It’s the pathetic infantile, teenage spitefulness of it which is so utterly soul-destroying. What wankers.

P.S.

Every photo has a caption. Initially, I thought these were the words of the people in the picture but, after counting, I note that only four of them are directly quoted, all the other captions are the comments of Anastasia Taylor-Lind or her long-term collaborator and friend, Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova. Some of Alisa’s comments are enlarged and painted directly onto the wall to create a textual commentary.

May also be worth commenting that all the text, from the introductory wall label to the photo captions, is bilingual, printed in English and Ukrainian. The curators tell us this is designed to ‘engage directly with the UK’s Ukrainian community’. As a matter of interest I checked and at its peak, in 2019, there were 25,000 Ukrainians in the UK. Since the war that number has been swelled by some 82,000 refugees i.e. a little over 100,000 in total.

The end

I’ve been rereading Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s books about the Yugoslav Wars. Ukraine is a different situation but, based on comparable situations in Bosnia in particular, where neither side was strong enough to secure a convincing victory, my guess would be that:

  1. the war drags on throughout 2023
  2. if Western support for Ukraine doesn’t remain high i.e. keeping up a reliable supply of arms and ammunition, then the Russians might score some victories, but
  3. eventually the UN will draw a ceasefire line across the eastern and southern parts of the country, which will remain in Russian hands, and the line will be like the one which divides Cyprus or Korea

It’s hard to imagine Russia seizing the entire country; think of the permanent insurrection and guerrilla war they’d face. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Ukrainian forces pushing the Russians right out of their country. So some kind of stalemate / ceasefire / partition seems the most likely outcome. But war is unpredictable, so it’s anybody’s guess.

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War Fever by J.G. Ballard (1990)

This is Ballard’s last collection of short stories, some very short indeed but some among his most experimental and enjoyable.

  1. War Fever
  2. The Secret History of World War 3
  3. Dream Cargoes
  4. The Object of the Attack
  5. Love in a Colder Climate
  6. The Largest Theme Park in the World
  7. Answers to a Questionnaire
  8. The Air Disaster
  9. Report on an Unidentified Space Station
  10. The Man Who Walked on the Moon
  11. The Enormous Space
  12. Memories of the Space Age
  13. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
  14. The Index

1. War Fever (1989)

Through the eyes of young Ryan we learn about the endless war in Beirut between small numbers of warriors divided into four factions, the Nationalists, Christians, Fundamentalists and Royalists. Ryan lives with his Aunt Vera and sister in a tiny apartment in a ruined tower block overlooking the wartorn city.

He is helped out by the kindly Dr Edwards, a United Nations medical observer (if I had a pound for every Ballard character who is a doctor). The story describes Ryan’s slow, faltering steps to bring about an end to the unending conflict, by asking everyone to adopt the blue hats of the UN peacekeepers, who man the main checkpoints but are forbidden from stepping in to stop the fighting for fear that outside powers will intervene.

Ryan’s scheme works surprisingly well and soon peace has broken out among a number of the factions. Ryan is just nervously approaching the formidable woman fighter Lieutenant Valentina when a series of colossal explosion occur across the ruined city. Ryan hares back to his apartment and discovers that Aunt Vera and his sister have been kidnapped!

Dr Edwards watches his face closely as he asks Ryan whether he’s going to rush back to his militia and resume the fighting. However, Ryan decides he is going to renew his determination to being about a truce. At which point Dr Edwards ties Ryan’s wrists together, pushes him into a jeep and drives him through umpteen checkpoints and right out of the ruined, smoke-filled city altogether.

Here, in a well-organised, clean depot and admin area packed with new guns and munitions, Dr Edwards explains to Ryan that Beirut is a huge scientific experiment. The whole of the rest of the world lives in complete peace: but they pay to support endless fighting in Beirut, supplying gun and ammo and orphans resulting from tragic accidents. Thus new generations of fighters are continually refreshing the depleted ranks of the four factions.

Why? In the same way that a handful of labs around the world keep supplies of smallpox which is otherwise eradicated: to study the war virus, to study what makes people fight, why they are motivated, how they organise and how far they will go.

It’s a version of The Truman Show with rocket grenades. Except that the exploding and the fighting gets perilously close. Dr Edwards rallies with the other UN behind the scenes staff and head back into the war zone. They drive to the wrecked sports stadium where Aunt Vera and his sister had been taken and should have been looked after. But Royalists managed to fight through the UN defences and kill everyone, the UN defenders, Aunt Vera and Ryan’s sister.

And it is then from the deep well of bitterness and anger at how and all of them have been played, that Ryan conceives his next Big Plan. He will unite the warring factions of Beirut. They will fight and overcome the UN forces. And then they will unleash the dormant virus of war and violence on an unsuspecting world!

2. The Secret History of World War 3 (1988)

A slight misnomer because this short squib is mostly a satire on American politics and the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

The narrator is a physician (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor) based in Washington DC, and this short story depicts a fictional future in which Reagan is replaced as president in 1989, but his successor is so lamentable that the American Constitution is amended so Ronnie can stand for president a third time and is, indeed, elected, at the ripe old age of 82. He’s so old that the media take to publishing regular updates on his health, the TV news starts having a President’s Health segment, and one day an ECG-type readout appears along the bottom of the screen. It’s Ronnie’s heartbeat. Soon half the TV screen is full of a panoply of readouts recording all aspects of the President’s health, and Ballard satirises the breathless commentary of TV hosts – the stereotypical craggy old guy and the glamourpuss blonde – and the way everyone in the country, including the narrator’s own wife, become more and more addicted to the second-by-second commentary which covers every burp and fart and bowel motion.

It is in the middle of this satirical vision of a celebrity president-addicted population, that mounting tensions between the superpowers (which have, satirically, only gotten the briefest of mentions on the news in between the analysis of what the President had for lunch) erupts into a sudden exchange of nuclear weapons which takes place on 27 January 1997 between 6.47 and 6.51pm. The Russians launch a handful of nukes which explode in Alaska, the Yanks launch a handful of nukes which explode in Siberia, then both sides come to their senses, end the war, and de-escalate the various tensions around the globe.

So the story isn’t really about World War Three in any way you might expect: it is a satire on the mediatisation of American politics, and the hopeless addiction to screens and an endless diet of celebrity news, bulletins and updates among the American public.

Thoughts

This story was published in 1988. Modern commentators think there is something new and unprecedented about twitter and so on, and of course smart phones and social media are new, in one sense: and yet here’s Ballard satirising a zombie president and the American public’s addiction to screens over thirty years ago. That’s why Trump and twitter just don’t seem that new to some of us: or are just the latest iteration of a very long-running issue.

3. Dream Cargoes (1990)

Johnson is thirty years old but comes across in this story as very simple minded. He’s the dogsbody on a decrepit cargo steamer named the Prospero. In the Far East its alcoholic captain, Galloway, lets himself be bribed into taking on board an extremely hazardous cargo of toxic chemicals and the steamer then chugs round South America and up the coast towards the Caribbean. But here a series of port authorities and customs officials forbid the Prospero from docking with a cargo which has slowly started leaking and discharging toxic fumes all over the ship as well as corroding its cargo hold and then the hull.

As the ship starts to list to one side and becomes wreathed in toxic fumes, Captain Galloway and the handful of crew decide to abandon the ship but Johnson stays on, deluded by dreams of being a ‘captain’. A day or so later he spots a small island somewhere off Puerto Rico and beaches the ship there.

Over the ensuing days the toxic waste spills everywhere and has a drastic effect on the local vegetation, which starts growing at a breakneck speed, while Johnson himself descends into the kind of malnourished-sick-fever-dream which is so familiar in Ballard’s fiction.

As new types of tropical plant burgeon all around him, Johnson realises the island is visited by a biologist, Dr Chambers (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor). She becomes involved in his dreams of becoming one with the island, of becoming one of the hyper-evolved giant birds and flying towards the sun (as in so many other Ballard stories) and (as in so many other Ballard stories) the way time is slowing down for him, as he goes into more and more trance or fugue states, so that his perceptions superimpose multiple images of the same object, creating a fragmented or crystal effect.

He stared at Christine, aware that the colours were separating themselves from her skin and hair. Superimposed images of herself, each divided from the others by a fraction of a second, blurred the air around her, an exotic plumage that sprang from her arms and shoulders. The staid reality that had trapped them all was beginning to dissolve. Time had stopped and Christine was ready to rise into the air…. He would teach Christine and the child to fly.

On the final page an American ship arrives and the US Navy lieutenant who comes ashore finds them both in quite a state – finds also that the giant flora seems to have overgrown itself and is now dying off. As he helps them leave the island Johnson reflects that he has gotten Dr Chambers pregnant and that their child might well be the first of a new species of human, and how they would fight to protect it from ‘those who feared it might replace them.’

4. The Object of the Attack (1984)

Cast in the format of diary entries by Dr Richard Greville (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor), Chief Psychiatric Adviser to the Home Office.

His diary entries concern a young psychotic who built and flew a glider over Windsor Castle during a state visit by President Ronald Reagan. But he got tangled up in some aerials, fell to earth and the police found he had loads of gelignite strapped to his body, wired to a detonator. Thinking he planned to assassinate the president and his entourage, the Boy, as everyone refers to him, is locked up in a series of mental institutes, where Dr Griffiths visits him.

Griffiths gives us a profile of this boy, Matthew Young, a devoted psychopath, who’s suffered from epilepsy all his life. He’s been through a whole raft of careers including trainee pilot and video game designer. What is common to them all is a pathological obsession with space flight, with the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle.

This becomes entangled with the concept of an Ames Room. An Ames room is a space in which furniture and other elements have been carefully arranged so that, from one chosen perspective, likely a peephole, it creates a completely convincing optical illusion. The concept was invented by American scientist Adelbert Ames, Jr. in 1946.

Anyway, Young escapes from a mental institute in Daventry by insisting on going to the chapel and being left alone. being a psychotic genius, he creates an Ames Room optical illusion by arranging all the furniture in the room to look as if he’s kneeling at the altar praying, when in fact he had arranged the pews in a ladder up to the ceiling and was crouched forward undoing the screws of the ventilator.

So Young escapes and disappears, going underground. Here the content of this short story gets quite clotted. Because Griffiths has figured out, from meeting the Boy himself and reading his journals, that it was never Ronald Reagan he wanted to assassinate, it’s a figure called Colonel Stamford, one of the last Apollo astronauts, who went on to have a successful career in business, and has now turned into a major campaigner against the evils of Communism. That’s why he was accompanying Reagan on the state visit.

And now Colonel Stamford is due to return to the UK, to address big Billy Graham-style public meetings, hailed by Newsweek as ‘a space-age messiah’, the ‘founder of the first space-based religion’. So the story contains quite a lot of speculating about how the space programme has morphed into a popular religion!

Griffiths turns investigator and decides to revisit the locked-up garage in Highbury where Young had been living when he was arrested. There’s a policeman on guard who lets him through and Griffiths pokes through Young’s belongings, finding more evidence of the deranged young man’s obsession with space flight.

Then he remembers that behind the lockup is a disused Baptist chapel and goes through into this. Here he discovers a bizarre scene, for Young is not only here (just yards from the protecting policeman – how did he get past?) but has been hard at work creating another Ames room, using props and posters from Star Wars and Dr Who to create a bizarre illusionistic installation of an astronaut on the moon.

Except that it looks like the Boy had an epileptic fit while at the top of the ladder and has fallen to the ground, bruising his face, cracking some teeth. Around him are the disassembled parts of a stockless rifle which he had been oiling when the attack kicked in.

And here’s the thing: Griffiths leaves him be. He frees Young’s tongue and windpipe, then tiptoes out and strolls nonchalantly past the police guard. Cut to a few weeks later as Stamford arrives in the UK, addressing both Houses of Parliament calling for a crusade against the evil empire of the non-Christian world, for the creation of orbital nuclear bomb platforms, for the launching of laser weapons which can be targeted on Tehran, Moscow and Peking. the story ends with Griffiths quietly confident that Young will have recovered from his grand mal seizure, completed his preparations and will be attending that evening’s grand assembly at Earl’s Court where Colonel Stamford will be addressing a cheering audience and will, God willing, be shot down by his psychotic assassin.

Thoughts

As so often in a Ballard story, not just the subject but the construction, the shape of the narrative itself, seems slightly askew, off-kilter. What starts out as a fairly limited study of one epileptic psychopath morphs before our eyes into an increasingly garish fantasia about an ex-NASA astronaut who’s founded a New Age religion and is frothing at the mouth about destroying Communism and Islam. It’s quite an extreme trajectory in just ten or so pages and, as with so many Ballard stories, I couldn’t figure out whether it was brilliant or – as I was more inclined to think – ludicrous.

When he writes narratives about individuals – like the protagonists of Crash, Concrete Island or High Rise – Ballard well conveys a delirious sense of psychological dislocation or alienation, and attaches it very effectively indeed to the imagery of late-twentieth century life, mainly the brutalist architecture of concrete motorways, flyovers, multi-story car parks, airports and vertiginous high-rise blocks.

But as soon as he starts making generalisations about society at large, and going on about NATO and NASA and the Third World War and Ronald Reagan and the Queen… something ineluctably cartoonish enters the stories; they become silly and superficial.

5. Love in a Colder Climate (1988)

A sort of sci-fi spoof or satire.

It is 2010 and the spread of AIDS and related viruses has put everyone off sex or physical contact of any kind. Younger people have become celibate with the result that the population plummets. By the date of the story, 2010, the government has introduced national service although, as Ballard would put it, of a very particular kind.

It is national procreation service. When they turn 21 young people are assigned partners by computer and have to report to the other person’s apartment – ideally dressed in one of the procreation-encouraging outfits – an Elvis Presley ‘Prince Valiant’ suit for men, a bunny girl, cheerleader or Miss America outfit for women – and are compelled to copulate. Satire. (Note how all these outfits are American. Born in 1930, America, American cars and movies and cigarettes and technology, represented The Future for Ballard from his boyhood on, as both volumes of his fictional autobiography – Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – powerfully convey.)

Ballard lays on the satire with a trowel with the suggestion that each young person is monitored by a personal supervisor who is a priest – the religious thought to have the mentoring skills and moral subtlety required – while young women are mentored as to how to have sex, lots of sex, by nuns. Satire. Anyone who refuses to have sex goes through stages of rehabilitation, which starts with being forced to watch porn videos and progresses to chemotherapy.

Anyway, the protagonist, David Bradley, is himself super-reluctant and when he is sent round to the flat of a young woman, Lucille McCabe, discovers she doesn’t want to either. They fall in love on the spot, and during the following months Bradley makes elaborate precautions to become her protector, swapping shifts, hacking computers to remove appointments with other men, even faking her pregnancy with the help of a friendly lab technician.

All to no avail. Their ruse is discovered when another lover is sent round by the computer and Bradley can’t stand watching Lucille being bundled towards the bedroom, they fight, Bradley is arrested and brought before a tribunal.

Here he is convicted of believing ‘the Romantic fallacy’ and of having ‘an exalted and idealised view of women’ and sentenced to three years additional national service. The only way out of it is to refuse and force the authorities to implement the ultimate sanction, and castrate him. This he happily submits to if it means he can be with the woman he loves.

Thoughts

As a child of the 60s, well a widower who lived through the 60s and took full advantage of the Sexual Revolution, Ballard is clearly satirising the rightward and puritanical shift caused by Mrs Thatcher and AIDS. Is it a good story, or heavy-handed satire? It’s certainly not weird hard-core Ballard and can be categorised along with his other relatively ‘straight’ satirical stories.

6. The Largest Theme Park in the World (1989)

Another satire.

Set in the near future when Europe’s last remaining countries give in and join a United Federation of Europe. In that summer (of 1995) millions and millions of students, middle managers and workers go for their annual holidays on the 3,000-mile-long strip of beach which is the Mediterranean shore from the Costa Brava to Glyfada.

But this time they refuse to come back. They become full-time sun worshippers, they take to beach exercises and martial arts. They become trim and lean and fit. When the police of the Mediterranean nations come to turf them off the beach, there are pitched battles and the sun-worshippers win. The heady summer of 1996 rolls into the spring of 1997 and there is now an army of 30 million strong living on camps along this huge narrow territory, in effect a new nation.

So far, so like a vision of the social collapse envisioned in High Rise but applied to beach culture. Beaches have always fascinated Ballard. The Terminal Beach is one of his most famous stories, but the story in which the world’s population suddenly has some profound primal urge in our primitive minds activated by waves from outer space, and walks, as one man, into the sea, is the most haunting variation on the theme.

This story is much shallower story than that one and its satirical climax – which feels pretty forced – is that the armies of the beaches eventually arms up and marches back north into the so-called United Europe, determined to restore a Europe of nations, each jealous of its borders and customs and traditions.

So it turns into an oddly wonky satire on the EU.

7. Answers to a Questionnaire (1985)

A short and interesting format, this text consists of 100 answers to a questionnaire – in fact more like some kind of police interview – where we don’t see the questions, just the answers in a numbered list.

It’s surprising how much you can pack into a brief format like this. Without any of the questions, and just via the clipped answers, quite a complicated narrative emerges – in fragments and cryptic references – in which the narrator appears to have befriended a Middle-Eastern-looking down-and-out with severe injuries to his hands, who is obsessed with DNA and ice-skating, who is a whizz at hacking into cash machines and extracting large sums, which they seem to have spent on organising group sex sessions.

They spend some of the money setting up radio antennae on top of the Post Office Tower pointing towards the constellation Orion and the narrator appears to have heard the figure’s voice as transmitted from the star Betelgeuse some 2,000 years ago, and appears to know the secret of Eternal Life.

This leads to the figure becoming super-famous, selling out Wembley Stadium and attracting visits from all sorts of luminaries such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his claim to know the secret of Eternal Life by injecting new DNA into the human germplasm, extending life up to a million years!

The pound rises on exchange markets, a serum is created and millions of people queue up to be injected, in fact the injections became compulsory for everyone over the age of 11. The side effects were impotence and loss of libido, but this hardly mattered if everyone was going to live forever.

But the very intensive bond between the Christ figure and the ‘accused’, the man answering the questions, seems to have turned sour. The accused seems to have bought a handgun and shot him, from seven feet, with three shots.

It ends with a boom-boom punchline. Literally reading between the lines of the fragmented answers, it seems as if the injections which promised eternal life have not worked, that the ‘accused’, because he was in prison during the time of the mass vaccinations wasn’t given one – and so he is the only man in the UK, possibly the world, who still has functioning sex organs and so ‘the restoration of the birthrate is now his sole responsibility.’

A smart story and a snazzy format. My favourite answer was to question 71, where the accused reveals that the mystery figure ‘wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile’. Very Ballard.

8. The Air Disaster (1974)

One of the new 1,000-passenger jet airliners is reported as having crashed somewhere just off the coast of Mexico near Acapulco. The narrator is a not very successful journalist who’s covering a fashionable film festival. His editor, like everyone else’s editors, sends him off to cover the disaster, but there’s a chance encounter in the petrol station where he fills up with gas. Two other journalists are talking to the pump attendant and through the language barrier he appears to be telling them the plane didn’t crash out at sea at all but up in the nearby mountains. The other two hacks don’t believe him and head off for the coast, but the narrator is suddenly seized by an intuition that he’s right. It would only have taken a fractional difference of height and speed for it to have hit the mountains.

So he fills up with gas and heads in the opposite direction up into the hills. He passes through a series of peasant villages, each one more impoverished that the last, until the final one where he enters Ballard-land and becomes genuinely scared for his safety as he watches the dirt-poor illiterate peasants eyeing him, his car, his cameras and everything else about him which they could steal. Trying to impress the narrator addresses several of these toothless old men, waving a wad of cash about and asking if there’s been a crash BOOM in the mountains, and are there bodies, corpses, cadavers?

The primitive old men nod and smile and point up to the last peak, so the narrator clambers up to the final small canyon between the snowy mountain peaks and discovers… the thirty-year-old wreckage of some military jet which crashed up here a generation earlier and is thoroughly derelict and rusted, ‘a tattered deity over this barren mountain’.

The wrecked airplane is, of course, a central symbol in Ballard’s weird imaginarium, recalling the Cessna Sheppard crash lands Myths of the Near Future, the excavated Second World War planes in My Dream of Flying to Wake Island, the abandoned Japanese fighters Jim sits in in Empire of the Sun, or the still-going but decaying planes in Memories of the Space Age…

Anyway, we can imagine his disappointment and chagrin at having gone on this long wild goose chase. But the kicker is in the last page. As he returns down the hillside he goes through the last village he passed, the one where he had brandished wads of money and asked for cadavers. Only to realise that the villagers have dug up their dead relatives and lined their earth-covered, half-rotted corpses along the wall by the road, in the hope that they will pay them. Gruesome. Macabre.

9. Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)

A nice little brain teaser told in nine short snippets described as ‘surveys’.

A spaceship arrives at what its crew initially take to be a small space station, happy to find it as their ship needs repairs. They enter the station to find it contains concourses full of tables and chairs like a giant waiting space at an airport terminal. They walk along one of these concourses and slowly realise it goes on for some distance, giving out left and right onto further mezzanines and waiting spaces with tables and chairs. When they force open the doors of one of the lifts they can’t see a top or bottom to the shaft. They drop furniture down one of the lift shafts and hear no sound: there doesn’t appear to be a bottom.

Each of the reports updates us as they discover the larger and larger extent of the station. Then they notice the floor and ceiling has a slight curvature, lifting their hopes and making them think it might be circular and they might eventually circle round on themselves. But even this is an illusion. The station appears to curve very slowly, indefinitely, in all directions, as if it is expanding.

By the point of the final ‘survey’ the author has come to the conclusion that the space station is as big as the universe; in fact it might be bigger. The distance they travelled in their spaceship from the solar system might easily be incorporated within the confines of the space station. By the end of the text the author has gone reliably mad.

Our instruments confirm what we have long suspected, that the empty space across which we traveled from our own solar system in fact lies within the interior of the station, one of many vast lacunae set in its endlessly curving walls. Our solar system and its planets, the millions of other solar systems that constitute our galaxy, and the island universes themselves all lie within the boundaries of the station. The station is coeval with the cosmos, and constitutes the cosmos. Our duty is to travel across it on a journey whose departure point we have already begun to forget, and whose destination is the station itself, every floor and concourse within it. So we move on, sustained by our faith in the station, aware that every step we take thereby allows us to reach a small part of that destination. By its existence the station sustains us, and gives our lives their only meaning. We are so glad that in return we have begun to worship the station.

10. The Man Who Walked on the Moon (1985)

An eerie story. Part of what’s eerie is how totally Ballard thought the Space Age was over and done by the 1980s. There were six crewed U.S. Apollo landings on the moon between 1969 and 1972, and then that was it. I’m inclined to agree.

This story is set in Brazil. It’s a first person narrative. The narrator is a failed journalist, kicked off a succession of ever-smaller papers and forced into giving foreign language tuition. His wife and his mother, who lives with them, despise him, and virtually kick him out the house each morning to go and get a proper job.

Hanging round the cafes he get to learn about a sad, wasted figure, a certain Mr Scranton, who is introduced to tourists as ‘the astronaut’. He isn’t an astronaut and the waiters laugh at him, the American tourists have their photos taken by him in a jokey kind of way. Our narrator does some background research into him and discovers Scranton was a crop-dusting pilot in Miami during the moon landing era, but was never anywhere near NASA.

The story recounts the way our narrator is slowly slowly drawn into this impoverished, thin, wasted man’s weird delusory world. He jokily introduces himself and says he’s writing a piece about sci-fi movies and would like ‘the astronaut’s’ opinion. But slowly, over their next few encounters, he becomes haunted by Scranton’s faraway stare, his gaze through the people and buildings of this world, his other-planetary loneliness.

The narrator asks whether Scranton has proof of his experiences on the moon and Scranton nods slowly. He needs to be helped back to his squalid flat above a fleapit cinema, the Luxor. Here he shows the narrator his ‘photographs’, his ‘evidence’. It consists of pictures torn out of Life and Newsweek magazine (note, American magazines). He’s mad, delusional, and yet…

He has known the loneliness of utter separation from all other people. He has gazed at the empty perspectives of the planets. He sees through pedestrians and traffic as if they were fleeting tricks of the sun.

Sick and ill, Scranton, like so many Ballard figures, wastes away and dies. And hands on his mantle. The narrator takes his place at the seedy café. Without any effort he finds himself slowly erasing the memories of his family life, his wife and mother and failed carer in journalism slowly disappear, to be slowly replaced by an alternative past, one in which he trained hard as an astronaut, in which he remembers the coastline of Florida falling away beneath the giant rocket. A past in which he genuinely did walk on the moon.

11. The Enormous Space (1989)

The first-person narrator is a merchant banker named Geoffrey Ballantyne. His wife has divorced him and run off with her lover, he was recently in a car crash and is still recuperating. (This reminds us of another middle-class narrator who goes mental after recuperating from a car crash, Faulkner in The Overloaded Man).

The story begins as he takes the decision not to go out of his front door. Ever again. To use up all the resources within the house and then live on space and time. In the event, after reducing himself to the familiar Ballardian condition of hallucinating malnutrition, he takes to luring the neighbours’ dogs and cats into his garden, killing and cooking them. He becomes more and more detached from reality and the house appears to grow larger and larger, soon having as many rooms as the Palace of Versailles.

I have embarked on a long internal migration, following a route partly prescribed within my head and partly within this house, which is a far more complex structure than I had realised.

His wife, Margaret, pops in a couple of times, each time noticing the progressive degradation of both the house and the narrator, but each time he manages to bundle her out. His description of the house becoming steadily larger, until he can’t make it up the stairs any more, until he can’t eventually make it out of the kitchen and remains slumped against the powerless fridge, watching the horizons expand to infinity. Until his former secretary, Brenda, pops round worried about him. By this time we have accompanied Ballantyne so far on his trip into psychosis that it’s her who seems the odd one out, and we are utterly convinced of his psychotic point of view as he describes her stepping over him slumped in his kitchen.

She is walking towards me, but so slowly that the immense room seems to carry her away from me in its expanding dimensions. She approaches and recedes from me at the same time, and I am concerned that she will lose herself in the almost planetary vastness of this house. Catching her as she swerves past me, I protect her from the outward rush of time and space.

See, no exotic words or contrived sentences or purple prose. Fairly flat, functional prose which manages to convey a state of complete derangement.

Ballantyne kills her, chops up her body, eats some and puts her head in the freezer, reminding us of the genuinely horrific climax of High Rise. Christ, this is a terrifyingly delirious text.

12. Memories of the Space Age (1982)

To an extraordinary extent this is a rewrite of previous stories such as News From The Sun or an alternate version of the contemporaneous story Myths of the Near Future, from the premise of the story through to the narrative structure right down to the use of the name Anne for key figures in both stories.

Here again we meet a former NASA physician, Dr Edward Mallory (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor) who has travelled to the abandoned zone of Cape Kennedy from Canada where he specialised in treated Downs Syndrome and autistic children. He has come with his wife, Anne. They are both afflicted with the ‘space sickness’ which has been slowly spreading out from the old NASA launching centre. The space sickness is a disease of time; the victim experiences fugues or largos when their time completely stops and they’re stuck stationary.

So for the usual obscure reasons, Mallory has come to live amid the abandoned hotels and shopping precincts of the beach resorts opposite the old launch site, squatting in a derelict room on the firth floor of an abandoned hotel, and foraging for food in the dusty abandoned supermarkets.

And of course, as usual, there is an Antagonist – Hinton, a former astronaut and in fact, the first astronaut to commit a murder in space, when he locked his co-pilot Alan Shepley into the docking module and evacuated its air, live, in front of a global viewing audience of one billion viewers.

On landing, Hinton was sent to prison, to Alcatraz to be precise. Some twenty years later, as the space sickness slowly spread across America, Hinton escaped from Alcatraz using a home-made glider. Now Mallory discovers he is restoring and flying the vintage planes from a nearby airplane museum, very much as Olds restores defunct cars in The Ultimate City.

The same obsession with man-powered gliders, in this case a pedal-powered microlight with a huge wingspan is being flown by a woman, Gale (short for Nightingale) Shepley, who swoops over him one day on one of his forays from the hotel room while his wife sleeps.

She lands and introduces herself, a young blonde who is the daughter of the murdered astronaut, Shepley. She has come to the ruined zone because she is expecting her father’s space capsule to finally re-enter orbit and crash down here – just like all those other Ballard women who wait for their dead husbands or fathers to re-enter the atmosphere and crash land beside the ruined gantries e.g. Judith waiting for her dead lover’s capsule to crash back to earth in The Dead Astronaut.

Mallory has even brought a collection of ‘terminal documents’ of the kind so many of these characters cart around, in his case:

  • a tape machine on which to record his steady decline
  • nude Polaroid photos of a woman doctor he had an affair with in Vancouver
  • his student copy of Gray’s Anatomy
  • a selection of Muybridge’s stop-frame photos
  • a psychoanalytic study of Simon Magus

Ballard’s gives a fuller, more explicit explanation of what exactly the space sickness is. It is the result of a crime against evolution. Human evolution has created a psychological aptitude to see Time as a stream with a past, present and future, a defence or coping mechanism which situates us within a dynamic timeframe.

The manned space flights cracked this continuum and now time is leaking away. Our perception of time is returning to its primeval one, an experience of all time in one continuous present, when Time – in the conventional sense – stops.

Mallory has a couple of encounters with Hinton who explains that the birds know about Time, they have never lost the primeval, reptile sense of Time. Which is why he’s trying to teach himself to fly by learning to fly each of the planes in the aviation museum in reverse chronological order, acclimatising his body to flight until, eventually, he can fly without machinery, and without wings.

In this context, Hinton’s ‘murder’ of Shepley was Hinton’s way of ‘freeing’ him from the tyranny of Time (exactly as the lunatic Sheppard in Myths of the Near Future appears to ‘free’ the birds by crushing them to death).

His wife is entering the end stage. Her fugues last nearly all day. In her few waking moments she begs to be taken up to the roof. She wants to see Hinton. She feels close to him because he is close to the secret. Eventually Hinton successfully kidnaps his wife. Mallory sees smoke coming from the old Space Shuttle gantry and takes a motorbike to ride there. He wakes up lying athwart it with his leg burning against the red hot engine. He had a fugue.

Gale arrives in her micro-glider to rescue Mallory and they travel on to the Space Shuttle gantry. Hinton has set fire to all the airplanes gathered at the bottom, and, as Mallory watches, Hinton and Mallory’s wife step off the platform and into thin air over the flames.

Maybe all shamans and primitive rituals, maybe all religions have been an attempt to escape from the prison-house of Time. Maybe the space sickness sheds light on why the Christian image of an afterlife isn’t an action-packed adventure holiday, but an eternal moment, an eternity of worship, stuck in stasis.

Gale keeps a menagerie by the swimming pool of the motel she’s camped in. Cheetahs, exotic birds and a tiger. As Mallory’s time winds down he hallucinates the tiger as a wall of flame. Gale is looking after him but, as always, there is a vast distance between Ballard characters and she is growing bored of him. She is only interested in the pending arrival of her father’s corpse as his space capsule finally re-enters earth’s orbit and comes streaming over their heads towards the space centre. One day soon Mallory will open the tiger’s cage and enter his wall of flame.

13. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (1967)

This is a really interesting experiment which I think totally works. It is based on one sentence of eighteen words:

A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles ‘Notes towards a Mental Breakdown’, recalling his wife’s murder, his trial and exoneration

and then each one of these words has a numbered note next to it.

A1 discharged2 Broadmoor3 patient4 compiles5 ‘Notes6 towards7 a8 Mental9 Breakdown10, recalling11 his12 wife’s13 murder14, his15 trial16 and17 exoneration18

And each of the numbers refers to a numbered footnote. So the story is in eighteen short sections, each one of which unpacks, analyses, dissects the precise meaning of its word, in the context of psychiatric and criminal case.

Thus you get to discover the narrative, the plot, the series of events, but in a beguilingly chopped-up, fragmented manner. I found it extremely enjoyable. It concerns the psychopath Dr Robert Loughlin (if I had a pound for every Ballard character who is a doctor) who has murdered his wife.

Obsessed with man-powered flight, Loughlin drove round the Suffolk countryside with his lover Leonora Carrington (this name is a straight copy of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, and the story references what appears to be one of Ballard’s favourite works of art, Garden Airplane Traps by Carrington’s lover Max Ernst; maybe at the time Ballard wrote the story she was so unknown he thought only a handful of cognoscenti would get the reference). Anyway he drives her round the Suffolk countryside from one abandoned USAF airbase to another, mesmerised by dreams of World War Three (exactly as Ballard describes his younger self doing in The Kindness of Women). As his psychosis intensifies, Loughlin rearranges furniture in his hotel rooms to create a notional flying machine and, only a few weeks before the muirder, makes a mad attempt to hire runway 2 at Heathrow.

His wife Judith was dying of pancreatic cancer and, tired of Loughlin’s erratic behaviour and alcoholism, absconded with her lover, Dr Douglas (if I had a pound for every Ballard character who is a doctor) to Gatwick airport. Loughlin tracked them down and somehow boarded a jet airliner which he ransacked for her, leading to a fight with a security guard who he shot. Then he made his way to Judith’s hotel room, broke into it, found the lovers out, ripped out the suitcase and proceeded to have a bath fully dressed and fuddled by alcohol and amphetamines.

When Judith returned she found the hotel room trashed and her psychotic husband passed out in the bath so she (presumably) decided to put him out of his misery and pushed his head under the water. But this revived him and psychotics are strong.

Loughlin murdered his wife, then dressed her in a flying suit with helmet and goggles, positioned her in front of him on the bed, as if they were in a plane and he was giving her flying lessons, and arranged all the furniture in the room to create the outline of a plane. Then he set the room on fire. (Just writing this out is making me feel like I’m losing touch with reality.)

14. The Index (1977)

This is a clever and, that rare thing for Ballard, very funny little text. It is what it says it is, the imaginary index to the imaginary biography of an imaginary figure, one Henry Rhodes Hamilton (presumably so named because his initials satirically spell HRH – His Royal Highness), supposedly a ‘physician and philosopher, man of action and patron of the arts, sometime claimant to the English throne and founder of a new religion.

The first page – the only page of ordinary text – briefly explains who he was and, more teasingly, wonders aloud who compiled the index? Has the indexer included himself in the index? Did HRH ever in fact exist? Has the text of the biography, which the index is for, been suppressed because it revealed too many secrets? Or was it never written in the first place? Maybe the entire thing is the figment of some deranged lexicographer? Is the whole thing a hoax?

Reading this one page with its paragraph of teasing questions makes you realise that texts like this were purpose-written to go straight into academic English courses about metafiction and post-modernism and the Lacanian mirror phase and self-deconstructing texts, straight into the matrix of academic jargon without ever having to be read by non-academic readers.

Anyway the index itself is very funny, in Zelig-type way HRH has known anyone who was anyone in the twentieth century and been present at pivotal moments. Karen Blixen proposes to him, Ernest Hemingway dedicates The Old Man and the Sea to him, T.S. Eliot dedicates Four Quartets to him, meets Gandhi, Freud et al, he is with Churchill at Yalta and suggests the famous Iron Curtain speech, he goes ashore on Juno Beach on D-Day (and wins a model), meets the Dalai Lama and Mao Tse-Tung…

And so it goes on, mingling HRH’s preposterous presence at key events and name-dropping key figures with the satirical narrative in which he founds a new religion and tries to set up an anti-papacy at Avignon. When Ballard addresses actual historical events and particularly when he starts making up religions etc, he quickly descends into childish cartoon mode (as described in the story about the American founder of a new religion in The Object of The Attack, but in this novel format it’s all very entertaining.

I laughed out loud when I read the index entry about Hitler:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgarten, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181.

Yes, as he rather did the entire German people. Hitler, Adolf, impresses German people 1939, disappoints German people 1945.

The last entry appears to refer to the indexer himself, and suggests his mysterious disappearance:

Zielinski, Bronislaw, suggests autobiography to HRH, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761

Thus, right at the end of the text, the indexer indexes himself out of existence. It was this which prompted the speculation in the one-page introduction that the whole thing might just be the products of ‘the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer’. Quite.

This may be the only really funny story in Ballard’s entire oeuvre, and it was a brainwave to close this final selection with it, helping to cleanse the reader’s mind, or at least control, many of the deeply disturbed, psychotic images which preceded it.

Commentary

A little exhausted by Ballard-land and Ballardism, I wasn’t sure I had the energy to read this, his final collection of short stories, but I’m really glad I did. It contains good examples of several key types:

  • satire on contemporary society – The Secret History of World War 3, Love in a Colder Climate, The Largest Theme Park in the World
  • classic psychodrama about astronauts – The Man Who Walked on the Moon
  • portraits of psychotics – The Object of the Attack, Memories of the Space Age
  • descriptions of complete mental collapse – The Enormous Space
  • tales of the macabre – The Air Disaster
  • mind-bending science fiction – Report on an Unidentified Space Station

As stories go, the ones in this collection seemed to me as powerfully imagined as almost anything in his earlier career.

But what has obviously gone, long gone, is the extraordinary verbal lushness and purple prose of the earlier works. Somehow the almost Oscar Wilde, fin-de-siecle level of prose pyrotechnics which characterises the early novels and stories got thoroughly washed out of the system by the ‘urban disaster’ novels of the early and mid-70s and from that point onwards his prose becomes a lot more straightforward and serviceable. Instead of lush and exotic sentences, he comes increasingly to rely on the repetition of a handful of key words – overlit, to the sun, calm, over-excited, deranged, time and space.

In later Ballard, repetition takes the place of elaboration.

And arguably the distinctive thing about the collection is the three short stories with experimental formats – Answers to a Questionnaire, Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, and The Index, each one a clever, one-off idea which I think Ballard executes really well. They’re very short but very effective and, in some ways, the most successful pieces in the collection.

Credit

‘War Fever’ by J.G. Ballard was published by William Collins in 1990. Page references are to the 1991 Paladin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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Posted by Simon on March 8, 2020

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