Book Review Hunger – Epilogue Photographs by Michael Ackerman Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue reminds us that photography is a death-defying feat. The book, his fourth, concludes Hunger, an anthology of photographs in seven parts, published by Void. The project is inspired by Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist — the tale of, literally, a ‘starving artist’ who displays his emaciated body with enthusiasm, despite losing his audience to new amusements..."
Hunger – Epilogue
Photographs by Michael Ackerman
Void, Athens, Greece 2020. 48 pp., 8¾x12½".
Michael Ackerman’s
Epilogue reminds us that photography is a death-defying feat. The book, his fourth, concludes
Hunger, an anthology of photographs in seven parts, published by Void. The project is inspired by Franz Kafka’s
A Hunger Artist — the tale of, literally, a ‘starving artist’ who displays his emaciated body with enthusiasm, despite losing his audience to new amusements. Epilogue, the series’ lone solo act, is a shrewd tribute to another practice past its golden era. Ackerman’s photographs confront us with the medium’s primary power — its spooky ability to transform time. Here, reality is altered. The dead are present, and the living preserved. Photography’s death and resurrection show is on parade.
In Ackerman’s dead/alive universe, the fourth wall is broken. The photographic process speaks directly to the viewer. Anomalies read as auras, unseen forces, or time itself: a horse trots into a void of fogged film lined with sprockets; an orbit of dust and scratches embeds a woman frozen in a hammock; a child floats in a glob of white chemistry, as if held by an apparition. People and places materialize through Xerox-like patterns of film grain. Holocaust victims beam brightly in pictures of pictures, projecting the uncanniness of copies. The book eulogizes photography’s analog age with contact-sheet sequences, polaroid grids, and prints with full-frame edges intact.
Epilogue amplifies all of photography’s visible features.
This second edition is shrunk down from the original massive broadsheet to a standard size. Its newsprint paper stock emphasizes Ackerman’s use of chiaroscuro, and fans of his previous books will note how the repeated pictures vibrate differently here. As always, his pictures are instantly mesmerizing and need no introduction. However, the included short texts add dimension. Ackerman himself contributes a poetic piece about the outsider status of both being a photographer and being a father. An essay by filmmaker Jem Cohen touches on the many layers at work in Ackerman’s art, such as how he masterfully ‘respects and destroys’ time, and the way he brings back dead friends, just ‘a little bit.’
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Cameras entangle light, time, observation, and automation. It is a curious thing. Michael Ackerman’s
Epilogue celebrates photographic reality. In its pages, transfigured beings and landscapes flicker like memories, or hallucinations. The book’s tone is mournful and strange: everything depicted seems to acknowledge that its dance with death is being recorded.
Epilogue memorializes life’s impermanence, and photography’s mysterious gift to capture it.
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Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph,
SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.
