Half Life

"Half life is the third of Michael Ackerman's books that we have published. It’s no accident. It’s because he crystallizes the new generation of photographers. More than the specialist imageries, it is his striking pairing that makes his talent, style and peculiar rapport with his subjects recognizable. An exceptional analytical quality that confirms elsewhere his exhbitions and international editions of his books.

End Time City could have made one think that, like so many of his peers, Michael needed exoticism, and that which was offered by Benares and the Ganges had the strangeness he was looking for. But no ; he is not one of those whose eye searches the world for political events, or environmental catastophe. Michael is an exile. Like so many others. But it’s not a need to find his roots that pushes him to so often leave the New York, where he resides, to the Europe he came from. It’s the need to go elsewhere, to see other humans, another light without looking for childhood memories or the afterglow of a time gone. The country, the city has to pull him in and keep him in. Like Krakow or Berlin. So he can live there long enough to know the nights and the days. So he can exhaust his universe with the constant worry of recreating what he has seen, not merely the description of a person, an cityscape, or landscape.

What he captures evokes a vision that was his and not a documentation of a fact. Most of his photos seem borne under a veil, in a morning fog, or at nightfall, but through this screen is how he perceives reality. His regard slides over his subject, as if Michael never stopped to see, or more that he needed an unadjusted truth. The faces of the women or men that appear from shadows don’t escape from the subtle movement, as if they were discovered without first announcing their arrival, as if the subjects that Michael chose were trying to escape a predator, as if a force was pushing them outside the frame. The fugitive perception that Michael has does not damage his expression nor the aesthetique of his image, but reinforces its valor, that of an instant fixed in the escape. Michael Ackerman is, in all evidence, an artist of our time, a tragic time, a time that forbids tracing the borders between present and future, between the instantaneous and memory."

Robert Delpire