This weeks review will be a little bit shorter than normal as I am travelling up to Georgetown for the Obscura photography festival. Having said that, I hope that the choice of book is as interesting to you as it is to me, it’s Michael Ackerman’s ‘Fiction’.

I have had this book for a while now and one of my measures of how much a book captures my interest and inspires me personally, is how often I return to it. By that measure, this is one of my favourite books. I have been thinking about why that might be, and, while I find it very challenging to verbalise, I am going to do my best in this article to try to explain my fascination for it and why I like it over other books that may appear similar.

Firstly, a litte bit of background for those unfamiliar with Ackerman’s work. This particular book is the most readily available, cheapest, and in my opinion, best example of what makes Ackerman tick as a photographer. Although published in 2001 its easier to get a hold of than the in some ways more complex, bigger and much more expensive 1999’s End Time City and his most recent work Half Life which was published in 2010. I think if you want to try out Ackerman’s work in photo book form then Fiction is the way to go. One thing to be aware of though is that the book has an interview with Michael at the end that is in French and I found some aspects of the printing to be flawed with creased pages. This is going to sound absurd but somehow I like that and for me personally I think it adds something to the book. That is just the weirdness of my mind though and I guess that if you get the chance you should inspect the book first or return it if you find the same problem and it troubles you more than me. I should say that it affected only a few pages but it shows poor quality control.

Getting back to the photography and Fiction itself, as you will see from the sample shots, this is a very dark and dreamy book inhabited by the shadows, ghosts and sometimes demons of Ackerman’s reality. This is an extremely important point to grasp though, and the more I learn about photography, the more crucial I believe it is to photograph your own reality and not the ‘expected’ or superficial aspects of reality that are obvious to everyone, that can only result in the alarm bell warning of what Anders Petersen called ‘the prize winning shots’ that he advised to avoid at all costs as they will undoubtedly be stylish and well composed but devoid of anything of real lasting value or insight because they are thought up and not instinctive reflections of your own world. I think that this is one of the fundamental aspects of the book that keeps me coming back to it because I can also recognise and relate to that reality in all of its brutal honesty and swirling darkness.

Ackerman is known for an approach that he calls ‘Introspective photography’ and indeed that is the title he uses for some of his workshops. He is of course not alone in that approach and I firmly believe that this is what other photographers that I admire greatly like Petersen, Sobol, Bazan and many others are doing, they are photographing their loves, fears, longings and desires, in other words shooting from inside, their personal reality.

It would be all to easy to mistake the form of this book as a more sanitised version of a D’Agata nightmare but I don’t see it like that at all. Firstly, remember that this is a work from 2001 and I also think the narrative is far superior. I get really stuck with D’Agata once I get over the initial shock I find the repetitiveness really boring. Apart from his wonderful ‘Valparaiso’ book I simply find that the books don’t hold my interest and I certainly don’t go back to them very often. That is just my personal view of course and I think that book volume sales would tell another story. What I like about Fiction though is the apparent lack of structure, there is no tight concept or project at play here, it looks, and importantly for me, feels like it a set of unconnected photographs that somehow come together to form a strange but fascinating tale that can be subtly different at each return viewing.

As with other books that I like, Fiction is nice and simple in physical construction and it doesn’t have to rely on presentation tricks to provoke interest. The content and photographic form say it all. I also think that the book can be as simple or complex as you (as a viewer) want and that is one of my fascinations with it, it can be flicked through and enjoyed or studied in depth depending on your mood.

I want to draw this short taster for Ackerman’s Fiction to a close now and I hope that the shots I have chosen and some of the descriptive text at least informs in a small way and at best will stimulate some interest to have a closer look at Michael’s work or perhaps buy this reasonably priced and very rewarding book.

As I mentioned, I am writing this from Georgetown in Malaysia where I came up for the Obscura festival. There are a number of very interesting works on show including by my friend KG Krishnan, Sobol and a number of Japanese works brought together by Yumi Goto. It all looks great and I can’t wait to see the exhibitions and hopefully pick up a few books for future reviews as I go.

Colin Steel Georgetown, Sunday 17th August 2014

Colin Steel

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Sunday Review Aug 2014 Ackerman