In Michael Ackerman’s work, documentary and autobiography conspire with fiction, and all of the above dissolve into hallucination. Common themes have always run through his photography and they’re equally grand and down to earth. Time and timelessness, personal history and the history of places. Decayed and damaged images, not as a matter of style but a direct analogue of experience, which is never pristine.
He was born 1967 in Tel Aviv and grew up in New York. During particular journeys he encompass Havana, Berlin, Naples, Paris, Warsaw, and Krakow, but the locations aren’t necessarily recognizable at all. Michael has been moving towards this erasure of geographical and other distinctions in his photographs for some time. There is surely a trajectory away from the constraints of a traditional documentary mode towards a very different way of getting at the world. (Jem Cohen)
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