and moving in with someone, when being able to watch them doing the most ordinary things is touched by rapture, undulled by familiarity. There is what might be called a lavatorial precedent for this kind of thing. In 1920, Jacques Henri Lartigue had photographed his wife Bibi, on their honeymoon, sitting on the toilet. The photograph is a frank and lovely record of a moment. Such frankness had, of course, become obtrusively routine by the late twentieth century. Ackerman does something else, regaining the lost delicacy of Lartigue’s image by inflecting it with a tinge of dream, as if what we are seeing is the record not of a moment but the way it lingers in the memory and becomes changed by its association with other moments, other memories.
I was keen to see more of these pictures from Paris but at that time Ackerman’s only book, End Time City, was of photographs from Varanasi (Benares). The lyricism of the Parisian images here gave way to a glaring intensity. These weren’t pictures you went and looked at calmly; they accosted you, came lunging and reeling at you. Some were like the shock of daylight after emerging from a dark lane; others were as impenetrable as a darkened alley after hours spent sightseeing in bright sun; most somehow contrived to be both simultaneously. And the felt subjectivity of the Paris photographs – the sense that Ackerman was recording not what he saw but what he was feeling – was even more pronounced. Offering a raw, stunned reaction to a place, they were like photos of the inside of his head while he was there. As such they seemed to insist on an equal ferocity of response from anyone looking at them. You could not simply admire or contemplate these pictures; you had either to love or recoil from them – or both.
One of Ackerman’s Paris photos was eventually used on the cover of the paperback of my novel, Paris Trance. Then, shortly after the book appeared, a strange coincidence took place. In Bangkok I was introduced to a photographer who showed me some examples of his work. After looking through his pictures I said that they reminded me somewhat of Michael Ackerman’s work. The photographer – whose name I’ve forgotten – flicked back through the pile of photos until he came to one of a shaven-headed guy and said, ‘That is Michael Ackerman.’
It seemed entirely appropriate that Michael Ackerman should look like an Ackerman photograph – even more so in what was evidently a self-portrait in his next book Fiction (2001). A chronology explained that he was born in 1967 in Israel and had moved to New York in 1974, but in the main body of the book dates and places had been entirely obliterated or buried. Fiction included the Paris pictures I had already seen but there was nothing, here, to indicate where they had been taken. Now they were just part of an ongoing, unlocatable swirl of images. Faces lurched out of the darkness; bodies writhed in shadow. ‘As I see it,’ Ackerman said in an interview at the book’s conclusion, ‘places do not exist. A place is just my idea of it.’ The intense subjectivity of the work I had seen earlier had been raised to the level of a solipsistic world-view. Often credited with instigating a move from ‘documentary’ to more personal photography Robert Frank had clearly been an influence but here the opposition to the idea of photography as documentary record had become nearly pathological. At a certain point Ackerman decided he ‘no longer wanted to see any information in [his] pictures’. In photos of the street he wanted to … get rid of the street! The sense of dislocation is exacerbated by extremities of contrast, the smudge and slur of printing. As a result it is sometimes almost impossible to see what is going on through the sleet and blur – until, that is, you stop trying to see through it and accept that the sleet and blur is precisely what is going on.
There is a considerable and dramatic gain in this approach but there is also a corresponding loss. The effects in the pictures of Benares were a specific and fitting response to a place. In Fiction the volume is consistently turned up to a point at which it distorts. Everywhere looks weirded out in the same way, irrespective of what or where it is. Like Francis Bacon, Ackerman himself seems happy to take this risk: ‘The pictures that mean something to me always evoke the same thing,’ he has said.
After being so fascinated by and curious about Ackerman’s work I finally got to meet him in New York in 2003. He arranged a slide show of some of his photographs at his apartment. The intensity of the work had not diminished at all; the same pitch of psychological torsion had been obsessively maintained. Everything in these pictures was melting, dissolving, deranged. Light itself had been turned into a species of darkness. It was as if the camera had been recalibrated in such a way as to preserve not what is there but what had been there a second or two earlier so that the frame is filled with the ghostly aftermath of action, a ghastly residue of gestures. The effect was charged, overwhelming, unrelenting. These were not pictures of a world, this was a world.
When the screening was over, eager to demonstrate some awareness of the technical side of photography (of which I know nothing), I asked Ackerman what he did to achieve the signature blurring and distortion of his images, his world. He looked at me as if the question made no sense at all.
‘That’s just how it is,’ he said.
2004
I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first was The Seventh Wave (2000), photographs of Australia’s beaches, by Parke and his partner – now wife – Narelle Autio. A more intimate and egalitarian collaboration is hard to imagine. Without the list at the end explaining which pictures are by whom it would be impossible to tell them apart. Much of the action takes place in or under the waves. You don’t look at this book. You open it and plunge in. Whoomp! Immediately, you’re immersed, submerged. They’re like pictures of being born, of people exploding into life beneath the sea, or bursting through the surface and into being. It’s as if evolution has been speeded up and compressed so that the origins of life on the planet turn, in a split-second, to the creation of an individual human life. In the same breath it’s mythic and candid – street photography from Atlantis!
The surface of the sea is a film separating two worlds, that of water and that of air. Though absolute, the distinction is perpetually on the brink of dissolving, melting away. People fly through the water as if suspended in a turbulent sky, or float through great clouds of aquatic light. That’s what water is for Parke and Autio – liquid light. Forms dissolve, blur, swim into and out of focus. Quick and silver, the water is a flash-flood of mercury. Part of the attraction of this undertaking, I’m guessing, is that the conventions of perspective and composition are not so much broken as bent out of shape, temporarily suspended. So completely has perspective been absorbed into our understanding of human perception that its abandonment suggests that we might be sharing a non-human or shark’s-eye view. This lurking sense of danger is also a product of association. When a squid is under attack it emits clouds of ink – which is exactly what we get here: huge oil-spills of dense, billowing black, while people dive and bomb through the surface and into the picture frame. They’re like human depth charges, or flash-bulbs exploding. As the shockwaves pass through the pictures it’s as if they’re in the process of being blasted apart – except it’s all pretty puny in comparison with the massive force of water, the rips and moon-tugged tides. Life on earth, in some of these pictures, looks like it could be ending as well as beginning.
The other book, Dream/Life, was actually published a year earlier. As with The Seventh Wave the impact is immediate and jolting. Wow! It’s only as you look at it over time that you sense that there is a degree of dues-paying going on. As with certain jazz albums original work is mixed up with a selection of standards – Parke’s own take on other photographers’ compositions. In The Seventh Wave there is what appears to be a version of Martin Munkácsi’s 1929 photograph of silhouetted boys charging into Lake Tanganyika. This was the picture
