Ackerman Michael

« From his first exhibition, in 1999, he stood out as the carrier of a new, radical and singular writing. His approach of Bénarès, gathered under the title End Time City, broke with any exoticism, any attempt of description, any anecdote, to question time and death with a freedom that allowed him to pass from the panoramic - a custom he renewed – to the square or the rectangle. In black and white, with a permanent risk-taking which brought him to investigate impossible light, he let the grain burst to impose enigmatic and pregnant visions. That he attempts to keep track of the last moments of Time Square inhabited by the lost or prostitutes or that he preserves, in Poland or in Italy, the memory of visions of light and strange characters, he always settles a world in decay, unattached, and on the brink. The tone is dark, the images are enigmatic and tense, the time is at once suspended and in imbalance. The world is tapped by a deaf pain, a permanent ill-being. Actually, Michael Ackerman looks for - and finds - in the world that he crosses the correspondences to his personal illness, to his permanent doubts, to his own fears. He admits it, discreetly, by regularly taking self-portraits, which are not narcissistic, but which say that he knows how to belong to this universe which goes badly. »

Christian Caujolle, Agence VU’ Galerie, Photo Poche n°107, Actes Sud, 2006