Photographer Boris Mikhailov's best shot

This photograph was taken in the 1970s in Kharkov, the town in Ukraine where I was born. When I was young, I loved basketball, but I wanted to become more cultured so I took up tennis. It's a sport that's all about social positioning: buying a racket is expensive, so not everyone can do it. I think of a tennis court as something that stands apart from society, like an animal's cage.

Being an artist gives you a lot of free time. In those days, I would spend it with my friends, Masha and Valera, always carrying my camera with me. One day, we were walking around and saw a field full of red flowers. Intuition told me to take a picture here. I didn't have to tell them what to do: everyone likes to pose for a camera. Valera, on the right, stands like that – boldly – all the time. To me, it's a very contemporary pose, symbolising the new generation. The flowers fill me with the feeling that the good in one's life comes as the result of the blood of others – the basis of Soviet life being the direct consequence of millions of sacrificed lives.

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

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

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

CV

Born: Kharkov, Ukraine, 1938.

Studied: Trained as an engineer then self-taught as a photographer.

Influences: Everybody. All cultures give me something.

High point: There have been many high points but not a single one.

Low point: Becoming known as an artist, because it has meant that people in Ukraine no longer give me permission to photograph them, so my access to people and places has lessened.

Tip: Look around you.