Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
It shows a bed frame choked by the abundance of stuff growing around and through it. The bed itself is sleeping in a bed of leaves, of grass. Soth notes that places like this may disappear as, each year, parts of the coast of Louisiana vanish into the Gulf of Mexico. The possibility that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this fear may already have been realised simultaneously raises the value of his work as documentary record (preserving evidence of what was once here) and as its lyrical complement, the reverie (an evocation of something intangible, subjective). ‘We all have a memory of life that goes on behind our eyes,’ said Frank. ‘Since 1974, in my latest photos, I have actually tried to show what was going on behind my eyes.’ Soth’s title also urges us towards a sense of slumbering subjectivity. These are images not just of places at a particular time, but of a kind of documentary dream-time.
This combination of the oneiric and objective detachment is susceptible, in part, to technical explanation. The cameras used by Frank and Winogrand were so light that they were able to snap pictures as they drove, without stopping. This was a great liberation but ease generated a certain profligacy. Stephen Shore remembers that when he made the trip that resulted in American Surfaces he ended up photographing everything. Moving to a large-format camera forced him to slow down. Sternfeld – who was one of Soth’s teachers – also felt the same. The large-format camera imposes a patience of composition and selectivity that is in keeping with the slow drift of a river. Whereas Frank snatched instants from the rush of time the view camera enfolds itself around a moment. In the course of a discursive trip down another river – the Danube – Claudio Magris remarks that ‘Squalor has a mysterious majesty of its own.’ The density of information of the large-format negative bathes squalor in its own peculiar majesty; it also lends a hallucinatory or dream-like quality to the most humdrum situation.
Soth’s work lacks the gleaming, pristine quality that Brodsky associates with the Neva because the river and the tradition of which it is, in this context, a physical manifestation have been around so long. Like many great rivers the Mississippi is no longer in any hurry to get to the sea (why bother? It’s seen it all before); cauterised by its own weight, the river drags its huge memorybelly along like a weary earth-coloured snake. It is too laden with history, with images. What it longs for more than anything, in fact, is to rest. After all this time it can get to the Gulf of Mexico in its sleep.
2006
I first came across Michael Ackerman’s photographs in a cinema in 1999. My then girlfriend and I were waiting for the film to start when she pulled out a copy of The New Yorker that featured a collage of half a dozen black-and-white pictures of a woman. In five of the six pictures she is in a cramped apartment, naked or in the process of getting dressed, cleaning her teeth, sitting on the toilet; one shows her dressed and out on the street. In the darkness of the cinema it was impossible to see the pictures properly, and I spent the next two hours impatiently waiting for the film to end so I could see this other movie – a whole film in just six frames! – clearly. Even in bright daylight this turned out to be impossible. That, it became clear, when I got to know Ackerman’s work better, is the point. By his standards, in fact, these images were razor-sharp. A caption explained that the six photos comprised a detail from a series called Paris, France, 1999. The pictures were subtly erotic, incredibly intimate and, as can happen when you are exposed to certain works of art, I felt as if something in me had been waiting for them. It was like falling in love.
No, it was more than that: it was like falling in love 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.