Half Life by Michael Ackerman

Half Life is Michael Ackerman’s third opus. After “End Time City” (1999), a crazy journey through the city of Varanasi, India, and then “Fiction” (2001), where unity of place is shattered into a sequence of images that seem to have been made in haste between New York and Europe, “Half Life” fills in the outlines of a territory that Michael Ackerman has depicted as his life has progressed, in recent years focusing on Poland and Berlin.

Portraits and landscapes emerge from pitch darkness and the kind of surreal lighting only Ackerman knows how to achieve. They reveal a mindscape that borrows from reality just enough to feed itself. Michael Ackerman’s approach involves no documentary intentions, apart from demonstrating his own way of looking at the world, made up of feelings of tenderness, love, loneliness and anxiety, but also underscored by doubts and obsessions.

Half Life forms a narrative in which past and present blend together in a subjective approach that blurs all temporal and geographical reference points.


Gallery on Agence VU website

Japan's crisis: one month later

Japan is just in the beginning of the long term recovery effort from the earthquake that struck off northeastern Japan on March 11. The crisis alert level from the damage to the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant has now been raised to the highest level of impact, the same as the Chernobyl Russia incident 25 years ago. Searchers continue to look for the dead, displaced Japanese live in shelters, protests continue over use of nuclear power, Japan's economic engine may be disrupted, the massive cleanup of debris is just underway, aftershocks are feared and many continue to mourn those who were lost. The photos collected here are from one month to the day of the quake and beyond. -- Lloyd Young

Complete gallery on "The Big Picture"

Irina Werning - Back to the future

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today... A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future (© Irina Werning).

Complete gallery at Irina Werning website

Single rooms by Steven Beckly

Single Rooms is a series of images exploring the interdependent relationship between home and identity, stemming from my experiences of inhabiting separate spaces simultaneously. Disconnected environments that I equally defined as “home” influenced my emotions, thoughts, and behaviour differently. What resulted was an awareness of apparent divisions in my identity, and accompanying feelings of unease, instability, and impermanence. My homes were separate but equal extensions of my identity, and I began to think as much about their influence on me as my influence on them. These ideas inspired me to explore the home-identity relationship when a stable and permanent environment defined as “home” is removed.

Rented rooms in motels, hotels, and inns were used as the settings for the photographs. Functioning as temporary homes, these spaces provided adaptable histories from which tenuous narratives could be created. Subjects were given a few hours to inhabit their rooms, and encouraged to draw inspiration from their environments for a character to portray. From these new relationships they established with their surroundings, transitory characters were created from these transitory spaces. The ambiguous identities formed from the negotiations between the subjects and their environments form both the context for and content of the images.

Gallery on Fraction Magazine