Michael Ackerman has been living between New-York and Krakow for a few years. With this project, for the first time in ten years, he works in New-York ; for the first time, he works in colour. In the beginning of June, he offers us a summery walk through his own New-York. Between the dikes of Coney Island and building façades, we encounter night birds and we stroll through disused factories.

A long term story in Poland, from Kracow to Katovice, the Eastern borders of Europe. This essay is about a border: the one that separates the European Union and its Eastern neighbours, but also the one that separates us from dream and unreality. Yet, we are awake and Michael Ackerman compels us to have our eyes wide open. The border is also the contact point with the Other. It’s a meeting place. Bodies and landscapes are bathed in an intangible haze and yet, they are unmistakably printed on film.

"I try to avoid the pitfalls of reality while maintaining a link with it. Photos are not inventions but encounters. I'm not looking for any aesthetic. That everything is haunted will not be completely intentional. But for me, photography is inseparable from the loss. Hence the need to cling to the impossible. Pictures are the only evidence of what has been experienced. But no facts at all. Whether something took place, whether one has had an experience does not mean one has actually known what it is and what it means for himself. This is often the limit of Photography - it does not penetrate. I want to express how I felt. This is the link with reality and experiences. While this is not the...

Michael Ackerman traveled to the Indian city of Benares. The city immediately had a huge impact on him, and he set out to capture it on film, particularly its religious rituals and customs surrounding the cremation grounds. People come here to die and bury their dead. This city sends us back to basics: body and spirituality, life and death. There are no loopholes. Here, a clotheless old man prepares to gird a piece of cloth with holes; there, in a shaded courtyard, a chained monkey gazes at the sky; on the river, a floating body stares at a child. The walls of this city are as naked, used and magnificent as the people themselves. Hands are held out, gazes burn. There are but the naked and...

In this series, Michael Ackerman shows us a tormented New York. A urban vision underpinned by the photographer’s fears, which are sometimes confused with our own. In an instant, the atmosphere is discovered: a city in perpetual motion, whose history resurfaced with a hint of popular imagination.