Half Life

Introduction by Denis Kambouchner.

Taken in Poland, Cuba, New York, Berlin and elsewhere, Michael Ackerman’s photographs are hard to place. They don’t describe reality but plunge us into nightmarish visions: desert landscapes blinded by clouds of ash, a train-car window scratched by absent hands… A hallucinated array of images of exile and of phantoms, in which places and people absorb us into the same black aura. Half Life implicates the observer in the borderline experience that composed it.