Hardcover 1st edition
Delpire (2010)
168 pages
153 duotone photos
clothbound hardback 21,0 cm x 31,0 cm
English
SIGNED COPY
Text by Denis Kambouchner
Half Life is Michael Ackerman’s third opus. After “End Time City” (1999), a crazy journey through the city of Varanasi, India, and then “Fiction” (2001), where unity of place is shattered into a sequence of images that seem to have been made in haste between New York and Europe, “Half Life” fills in the outlines of a territory that Michael Ackerman has depicted as his life has progressed, in recent years focusing on Poland and Berlin.
Portraits and landscapes emerge from pitch darkness and the kind of surreal lighting only Ackerman knows how to achieve. They reveal a mindscape that borrows from reality just enough to feed itself. Michael Ackerman’s approach involves no documentary intentions, apart from demonstrating his own way of looking at the world, made up of feelings of tenderness, love, loneliness and anxiety, but also underscored by doubts and obsessions.
Half Life forms a narrative in which past and present blend together in a subjective approach that blurs all temporal and geographical reference points.
Michael Ackerman. An American by birth, Michael Ackerman was born in Tel Aviv and moved to New York in 1984. After studying he began to photograph in the city’s streets, nightclubs and on its waterfronts. Between 1993 and 1997 he made several trips to Benares, India. The photographs from that project were published as End Time City by Robert Delpire, the legendary Paris based publisher.
He was a member of the prestigious Agence / Galleries Vu, his work has been exhibited internationally and he has won several international awards including: the Prix Nadar, the SCAM Roger Pic Prize and the International Centre of Photography Infinity Award.
His work is in many major collections and in 2010 it was included in Traverse, the book and exhibition of the collection of Marin Karmitz which was shown at Rencontres d’Arles. Michael Ackerman now lives in Berlin.
Denis Kambouchner. Denis Kambouchner is a philosopher and historian of French philosophy.
