This is End Time City, by Michael Ackerman
End Time City appeared in 1999. Ackerman gives us an hallucinatory vision of Benares: labyrinthine images of a city inhabited by death and teeming with life.
This exhibition mainly presents vintage prints made by Max Pam and Michael Ackerman. Not strictly taken from these books, in any case they represent their spirit (and also the continuity with some new images of Ackerman).
Didier Brousse
Michael Ackerman
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Michael Ackerman spent his childhood and youth in the USA, where his family emigrated in 1974. He now lives in Berlin.
Michael Ackerman’s photographs have an instantly recognizable evocative force and style. In 1999, the publication of “End Time City” by Robert Delpire was a shock and the rare discovery of a new talent. Ackerman gave us his hallucinatory vision of Benares: labyrinthine and tormented images of a city where life is as abundant and excessive as death inhabits it. All of Ackerman’s work reflects this image, of an existential urgency that is sometimes desperate and luminous, violent and tender.
“Photos are the only proof of what we have experienced. Not the facts themselves. That something has happened, that we have experienced it does not mean that we actually know what it is about. And what it means to you. This is often the limit of photography – it does not penetrate. I would like to see in it what I felt. This is the link with reality and experience. If it is not the case, I believe, it is because I did not go far enough in what I lived. As if out of cowardice. Some pictures come out of nowhere, I do not remember having taken them, they are, above all, related to the reality of what I felt. ”
Michael Ackerman
Max Pam / Michael Ackerman / Paolo Roversi : “Going East”
February 12 to April 3, 2021
Galerie Camera Obscura
268, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris
