Benares, India 1993 – 1997
 
At the age of 25, Michael Ackerman discovered India for the first time. It happened by accident, in 1993, on his trip back from the Philippines where he had gone to photograph the rites of Holy Week. He was so turned on visually and emotionally during his stay in Benares that he continued to go back there every year from then on until 1997. End Time City, published by Robert Delpire in 1999, won the Prix Nadar revealing him as one of the great talents in the world of contemporary photography for his unique and radical approach. His hallucinated vision of the sacred city of Benares breaks away from all sorts of exoticism or any anecdotal attempt at description with a gaze that is always free, always at the limits of the possible, always able to integrate different formats, cultivating darkness without ever sinking into despair.
 
 
“Michael took photography to its limit. He did this by juggling with different formats, in an elegant but never manneristic way and with a powerful rhythm that permeated all the pictures. The outer limit in question involved light and contrast, taking extreme risks, on the borderline of the image that doesn’t work, and also an extreme way of saying “I”, being there and having his say in a way that some might mistake for arrogance, whereas all it is the generous honesty of a radical distance. Squares, rectangles, panoramic views, Benares, to my eye, receded and I was lost among the milling people and the areas of darkness, the grain at times burst asunder by the sheer light, a monkey flying though wires, being brought face to face with a corpse being cremated. (…) And in the final analysis he set me face to face with time, with that contradiction of the temporal aspects of experience and photography. And, at the end of this time, something interrogative about this life, which is haunted by the inevitability of death. At the end of time, in a word, in a city where men and women go to die.”
Christian Caujolle

 
(Excerpt from the text written by Christian Caujolle in the book End Time City, first edition Nathan/Delpire, Scalo 1999)