Boris Mikhailov and Wolfgang Tillmans grew up worlds apart. In the year Tillmans was born, 1968, Mikhailov, then living in Kharkiv, held his first exhibition. Because the KGB had discovered nude photographs of his wife, leading to his dismissal from an engineering job, photography became his only path forward. Twenty years later, Tillmans, who grew up in Germany, spent weekends visiting museums in Düsseldorf and Cologne. He studied the photo-based works of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Both Mikhailov and Tillmans were drawn to photography as a means of fusing the personal and the political. The two pioneers present their work in Mikhailov’s native city—Kharkiv—now devastated by war. —Elena Clavarino