Michael Ackerman likes to define himself and his pictures with negatives: not a traveler, not interested in Jewish identity, not drawn to self-portraiture, quest for roots, fact-finding or documenting. But his work clearly combines a European sensibility with his American experience, evoking both the "flux of consciousness" of the 1930s European writers and the contemporary music of those he likes to colaborate with: Cat Power, Mark Mulhany and the Atlanta-based singer Benjamin.

Like Larry Clark's TULSA, Dave Heath's SOLITUDE and Machiel Botman's HEARTBEAT, to cite just a few books published between the 1970s and today, Ackerman's second book, FICTION (Editions Delpire), gives little room to text and none to captions. All his photographs have a grainy texture and blur evoking aquatint. Taken on the street in New York, Berlin, Katowice, Naples, Marseille and Paris, they occupy a full or double page and are loosely organized in sections separated by a white space that feels like a musical pause between two jazz riffs.


-- Carole Naggar