The Camera Obscura Gallery is welcoming Michael Ackerman for the first time with this exhibition. He gives us a vision as powerful, ghost-filled, as places that inspired his work for years: India, New York, Poland … But the intimate also has its importance in this work, which is obviously a autobiography: the birth of his daughter embodies the sweetness of a world that is not only fury.
Watermark. This title refers to a small laboratory incident. A sign. On the contact sheet of the film made just after the birth of his daughter, a circular mark, as drawn by an invisible hand, surrounding precisely the face of Jana.
Simple trace due to a drop of limestone water.
But watermark also refers to the watermark, pattern hidden in the thickness of the paper, that only the backlight reveals. Ackerman does not only show the visible world: through his photographs, other images appear, that appearances suggest, provoke. The story emerges from the landscapes, it infuses the places, the characters. The photographs of Ackerman resonate long in us, in depth.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Michael Ackerman spent his childhood and youth in the USA, where his family emigrated in 1974. He lives in Berlin today.
In 1999, the publication of “End Time City” by Robert Delpire was a shock and the rare discovery of a talent of great intensity. Ackerman gave us his hallucinatory vision of Benares: crepuscular and tormented wandering in a city where life is all the more exuberant as death inhabits it. All of Ackerman’s work is in this image, of an existential urgency that is both desperate and luminous, violent and tender.
Michael Ackerman – Watermark
June 7 to July 27, 2019
Galerie Camera Obscura
268, boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
