Michael Ackerman - A Brief Interview

Although Michael Ackerman is one of the most distinctive artists working in photography today, interviews with him are comparatively rare, especially online. This short piece (in English and French) is an exception to that rule. He discusses the development of his latest book, which is entitled Half-Life. I have previously written about Ackerman here.


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Laurence Demaison

It’s perhaps true that you are not yourself, your presence, but something else – a fragile series of reflections that happen to occur in one moment, just a frame for the abstractions of your being. In her numerous photographic works Laurence Demaison shapes a relentless study of identity as some bottomless depth covered by nothing more than our bodies and the narrative of what we have lived; you try to remove the mask and part of your own face comes along with it. Yet the camera does not create or reveal these subtle distortions of perspective, it is merely an analogue for the uncertainty of what we see – the burden of having to live and think of ourselves in images. Demaison’s use of the self-portrait as a form is not really about introspection; photography allows for a disappearance into the physical multiplicity of her own image, becoming nears the kind of absence we otherwise only suspect – in seeing the image we do not see “her” at all, but instead the very idea of self, it’s limit. She is her own disguise, engaging with some of the most troubling aspects of our subjectivity. It would be a mistake though to think of her as elaborating an infinite number of possible selves, with none of them being authentic or “real” in any way, as is the critical orthodoxy we have grown accustomed to in recent years – Demaison’s position is more complex than that view allows for, more disturbing even. They clamour for attention, this riot of selves, undeniable in their traumas and their pleasures, all real, viscerally real, or more correctly what can be called “real” about them is the deep absence that each of them suggests and which cannot in turn be represented, the absence of any certainty for who we are outside of those images we have of ourselves.

Demaison's output is considerable, explore her website for yourself. There is also a useful section here that presents an overview of her various projects.