Michael Kenna
BLACK & WHITE LANDSCAPES
Michael Kenna (born 1953) is an English photographer best known for his black & white landscapes. Kenna attended Upholland College in Lancashire, the Banbury School of Art in Oxfordshire, and the London College of Printing.In 1977, he moved to San Francisco, where he met Ruth Bernhard and became her assistant and photographic printmaker for eight years. Michael is equally dedicated to the darkroom and makes his own prints ensuring a subdued, intimate atmosphere in every image.
I often think of my work as visual haiku.
It is an attempt to evoke and
suggest through
as few elements
as possible
rather than to describe
with tremendous detail.
Michael Kenna
'I gravitate towards
places where humans have been
and are no more, to the edge of man’s
influence, where the elements are
taking over or covering
man’s traces'
Michael Kenna
His work has been shown in galleries and museum exhibitions in Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. He also has photographs included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Patrimoine photographique in Paris, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His photography of the ruins of concentration camps was featured in the opening credits of the Holocaust film Esther's Diary (2010).
Kenna's photography focuses on unusual landscapes with ethereal light achieved by photographing at dawn or at night with exposures of up to 10 hours. Since about 1986 he has mainly used Hasselblad medium format and Holga cameras and this accounts for the square format of most of his photographs.
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