Michael Ackerman
Book Review
Artist: Michael Ackerman
Photobook: Hunger – Epilogue
Publisher: VOID
Specs: Softcover, 22 x 32 cm, 64 pages
Price: €26
Michael Ackerman’s Hunger – Epilogue (published by Void) arrives like a specter, a haunted fragment of something we recognize but cannot name. The book feels soft, heavy, and jagged at its edges. I’d call it a map of human states, a plunge into mental spaces that refuse coherence, drawing us in with a force that is at once magnetic and unnerving. To leaf through Hunger – Epilogue is to succumb to Ackerman’s uncanny ability to manipulate time, space, and memory.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to images that exude an aura—a pulse, a residue of life vibrating beneath the surface. Ackerman is a master of this “aural” photography. His frames go beyond aesthetics; they disrupt, they disturb, they disorient. In Hunger – Epilogue, we encounter photographs that feel like excavations—cropped histories, fractured moments that hint at something larger, as though Ackerman has unearthed remnants of a dream we’ve all shared. What are we looking at? Who are these people—children, strangers, ghosts? Each image whispers of lives lived on the edge of recognition, and yet they feel deeply familiar, like shadows cast by our collective subconscious.
“(…) Each image whispers of lives lived on the edge of recognition, and yet they feel deeply familiar, like shadows cast by our collective subconscious.“
The sequence of images is non-linear, a deliberate disarray that mirrors the cycles of memory and forgetting. Children appear—their innocence taut with the tension of impending adulthood. There are animals, too—foxes, seahorses, elephants, birds—creatures imbued with spiritual significance where their presence is both grounding and otherworldly. The photographs are mostly monochrome, punctuated by occasional, washed-out colors that feel like they’ve been siphoned from a distant, crumbling world. The textures are rough, and tactile—Polaroids, contact sheets, analogue grains. As Jem Cohen notes in his accompanying text, “A contactsheet can be a universe unto itself, an unfolding play.” Ackerman’s photographs, like a contact sheet, seem to unfold with a rhythm of their own, each frame a world of possibility, a desire to relive certain moments and go against the unapologetic nature of temporality. “Time, in its greatest disarray, is a specialty of Michael,” Cohen continues, and it is this very disarray that drives the hypnotic, fragmented narrative of the book.
There is a deeply personal undercurrent to this work, an aching intimacy that gradually intensifies in the book’s latter pages. Ackerman’s text on fatherhood, written as a journal passage, shifts the tone. The love of a father, he writes, cannot measure against the love of a mother. Beside these words, diary entries appear—typed, handwritten, messy—as if torn directly from his life. We are voyeurs, trespassing on something private, and yet the experience is universal. These fragments remind us of life’s cyclical nature, of repetition, of the ways our personal histories fold into collective ones. As Jo Spence and Patricia Holland suggest in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, “Family photography can operate at this junction between personal memory and social history, between public myth and personal unconscious,” and in Ackerman’s case, this junction feels like a shared, haunting liminality.
“(…) Ackerman is a master of this ‘aural’ photography. His frames go beyond aesthetics; they disrupt, they disturb, they disorient.“
The inclusion of images of Anne Frank and Holocaust victims pierce with a different kind of intensity. They evoke guilt, memory, and a shared trauma we all carry, even if only as fragments. These are memento mori for a history that is both personal and communal. They root the book’s meditation on mortality, its punctum (the deeply emotional detail that pierces and disturbs, as Barthes describes in Camera Lucida). The dead look back at us, and we are left to grapple with the brutality of human nature, the inescapable weight of existence.
The book draws its name and inspiration from Kafka’s A Hunger Artist, and the parallel is clear. Like Kafka’s starving performer, Ackerman’s photographs dwell in liminal spaces, between life and death, presence and absence. Here, time is devoured and reshaped. The dead are alive. The living are frozen. Faces peer out from history’s rubble, and the weight of their gaze is almost unbearable. Ackerman’s photographs make you feel scrutinized by them, interrogated by their impenetrable silence.
To borrow from Walter Benjamin, the camera introduces us to unconscious optics, revealing what we cannot see on our own. Ackerman’s work operates in this realm of unconscious vision. His photographs are not of people but of states, emotions, and thresholds. They pierce because they are so familiar. The unrecognizable becomes intimate, the alien becomes us. This is the paradox at the heart of Hunger – Epilogue.
“Ackerman’s work operates in this realm of unconscious vision. His photographs are not of people but of states, emotions, and thresholds. They pierce because they are so familiar. The unrecognizable becomes intimate, the alien becomes us.”
According to Cohen, Ackerman’s artistry lies in his ability to “respect and destroy time.” The book flows like a trance, its rhythm punctuated by moments of piercing clarity. It is mournful and strange, alive with the impermanence it memorializes. In Ackerman’s hands, photography becomes alchemy, a transformation of light and shadow into something spiritual.
Hunger – Epilogue is an excavation of memory, a meditation on mortality, a glimpse into the unnamable. It derails us, destabilizes us, and perhaps, for a moment, that is exactly what we need.
Hunger-Epilogue is available for purchase via VOID here.
Michael Ackerman
was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1967. At the age of 7 his family emigrated to New York City, where he grew up and began photographing at the age of 18. He has exhibited internationally and published 4 books, including End Time City, by Robert Delpire, which won the Prix Nadar, 1999. His work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Biliothèque National, France among others, as well as in many private collections. He lives in New York and is represented by Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris, Spot Home Gallery, Naples, MC2 Gallery, Milan.
VOID
is an art-house publisher established in 2016 by Myrto Steirou and João Linneu. Void is home to books that would not find a place elsewhere. Never compromising, their projects mix unique narratives with innovative design and fine experimental materials.
Text by Linda Zhengová
Curator of Discarded Magazine & XXX
She is a photographer and writer dealing with the topics of trauma, gender and sexuality.