The rest he gave to the Caen Memorial, a museum for peace in Caen, France. Even more unsettling in its hint at the unknown is “Plank Walk” (1992), in Morecambe, Lancashire, where a teasing perspective shoots the parallel edges of the horizontal boards to just short of a single point in this image of a pier that tricks us into believing it’s floating high above the water. That shows in his photographs.” We feel thoroughly honored and blown away by his humbleness for him to have accepted our request. In a similar vein of influence, Michael Kenna has stated that he thinks of his work as "more like haiku rather than prose." “With long exposures (up to TEN hours), you can photograph what the human eye is incapable of seeing,” like the star trails in “Cloud Shadows, Study 3” (1998), another Mont St. Michel scene. He sees in his work that unpopulated interval between acts of a play, when “there’s a tension in something about to happen and the mind lets loose in a stream of consciousness, wondering and questioning. In his photographs of historic rural landscapes, for example, there is an air of melancholy, which accompanies memories from the past. its really amazing monochrome, Your email address will not be published. It was pure trial and error.” The result is “Swings” (1977), its skeletal form haunted by the glow of a street light. Pichler’s wife, Maya Ishiwata, who represents Kenna in Japan, and who joined him and his camera there for some days, tells me, “We’d be driving or walking, and he’d see a place that he’d return to the next morning or late afternoon by himself,” but not necessarily to take pictures. They invite us all to participate in his experience, closing the circle between print, photographer and onlooker,” I read in Ruth Bernhard’s essay in Kenna’s A Twenty Year Retrospective (Treville, 1994 and Nazraeli Press, 2002). They were just reductive copies of the experience of being there,” he says. Where they end up no one knows, as in “Tow Path” (1984), in Blackburn, Lancashire. His personality has had 50 years to get there. Of his collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 1976 exhibit, The Land he says, “I saw an extremely powerful atmosphere, in his skies full of nostalgia and melancholy, his profound use of night photography with dark shadows and no details, and his sense of melodrama. See it for yourself as Michael walks through snow and ice, just to discover the glory of pure nature. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories.” It kindled in me the desire to know more about the Holocaust, taught only briefly at school,” he says. He says, “You can’t always see what’s otherwise noticeable during the day,” like the automatic sprinkler system that surprised his camera once. Their work seeped into my blood.” The same benign stance in Kenna’s concentration camp photos shows in his images of the Ratcliffe Power Station in England and the Rouge Steel Works in Dearborn, Michigan. April 2003 We feel thoroughly honored and blown away by his humbleness for him to have accepted our request. “I was around all this amazing imagery, photographs by very famous people I hadn’t even heard of. While some may criticize Kenna’s work as being overly romantic and atmospheric, Bill Jay, a photographic journalist in San Diego who has known him for 25 years, has this to say: “The reason I like Michael’s photos is because they’re antithetical to the unemotional, deadpan work of his contemporaries. Shows the magnificence of composition, the excellence it can provide and elevate your photograph or artwork to a totally new level. See more ideas about Photo, Photography, Case study houses. excellent photographer, wonderful work May 17, 2018 - Explore gimferrer's board "Photo", followed by 7028 people on Pinterest. These Photographs are words of emotions, sometimes silence and at times the music from a bird’s feather flock. Meanwhile, the Shikoku portraits of an origami-surrounded Buddha in “Protector with Cranes” (2002), at Mandara Temple, and the ornately shrined metal statue in “Head of Buddha” (2002), at Jizo Temple, represent the few human likenesses in Kenna’s oeuvre. Michael Kenna’s world travels. Greatly influenced by the transformation of negative to final print undertaken by Bernhard, Kenna patiently makes every print himself, burning and dodging to perfect the balance of each image. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. For Kenna, these images allude to the “solitary aspect of the journey through life,” he says. Serene and mysterious, they pause at the interim of past and present, night and day, realism and abstraction, in scenes that invite reverie and reflection. Required fields are marked *. “He never includes any unnecessary ideas. Says Kenna, “She took creative license with a negative more than anyone else I’d ever seen, cropping, elongating, retouching and playing with contrast. !” since he is one of the most influential black and white film photographers of the last century and this one. “Life is about turning up. What he presents in the picture is suggested. Other times, you think you’re getting something amazing and the photographs turn out to be boring and predictable. “Getting photographs is not the most important thing. She opened my eyes to the possibilities of the printing process and I went back and printed earlier negatives of mine, now that I could interpret them in a way I’d never thought of before.” Bernhard also influenced Kenna “spiritually, with her attitude about the world and life in general, and her openness and connectedness, her ability to say yes to everything.” After a year at the Banbury School of Art, Kenna applied to the London College of Printing in both the graphic design and commercial photography departments, figuring he’d go with the one that accepted him first (he graduated from the latter, in1976). Often working at dawn or during the night, he has concentrated primarily on the interaction between the ephemeral atmospheric condition of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass. In 1977, when Kenna moved to the States, to San Francisco (where he still lives), “I saw that galleries existed here and people actually showed and sold their work.” It wasn’t long before he was one of them. Michael Kenna was born in Widnes, England in 1953. “I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don’t think it’s necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. Says Stephen Wirtz, of San Francisco’s Stephen Wirtz Gallery, who has represented Kenna since 1978, “Even though they’re landscapes, there’s a figure-ground in Michael’s work that is more sculptural than painterly.” And he strongly believes “Fortune favors the one, who works hard”. Kenna's work often evoked teh influences of Romanticism. Other locales have come with his commercial clients, such as Volvo and Rolls Royce, The Spanish Tourist Board and British Rail, Don Perignon and Sprint. “I like dim, vague, soft light. He’s willing to plough his own furlough, remaining consistent and true to his own vision, in opposition to the pressure of the establishment.” Recently, at the Oregon Coast, I did just that, until the cry of seagulls began to lift open the day. Michael Kenna has also stated that he is greatly inspired by the landscapes of Japan, and he has photographed almost the entire country-the results of which were published in a book named after the nation. His books include Forms of Japan and Rouge, which is a study of the US industrial heartland. Night’s strong shadows, and light that comes from all directions inspire Kenna, who enjoys the unpredictability of shooting in the dark. “He has a clear sense about what he wants to put in them,” the 98-year-old Bernhard tells me by phone from her home in San Francisco. Ribbons of Birkenau railroad tracks stream out to a sentinel of trees in the misty distance. Michael has also exhibited widely. “There’s a deeper satisfaction when you have a long-term relationship with a place. Kenna travels around the world constantly photographing the varied landscapes of the planet, including China, the United States of America, Brazil, Czech Republic and Egypt. “Then, there’s a certain tension in the light; it changes by the minute,” he tells me. Kenna's interest in fine art photography was triggered after viewing "The Land" an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975, curated by Bill Brandt. Following Bernhard’s lead, he burns and dodges, emphasizes stormy cloud and shrouds of light (sometimes turning day into night, and vice versa), and crops out the superfluous. Many of Kenna’s images fictionalize time even further with his camera’s elongated exposures, elaborating on the elasticity of the light that dwells at dusk and dawn. He revisited these places after Brandt’s death in 1983, both as a homage to Brandt, and to photograph them himself. Speaking about his personal stature, Michael Kenna is an English Photographer who loves to capture the incredible nature with some beautiful light. Michael Kenna (born 1953) is an English photographer best known for his unusual black & white landscapes featuring ethereal light achieved by photographing at dawn or at night with exposures of up to 10 hours. His images of ruins stir up feelings of passing time, of the constantly evolving … I’ve always been intrigued with water—oceans, strong waves, mist, fog, rain. More interpretive than documentary, Kenna’s images facilitate our gaze, so we can never forget. Kenna’s night photography also has informed the way he works in the darkroom. 50 Dec. 03 - Jan. 04 by Brooks Jensen “Commercial work is very challenging. But not as much as the photos of Bill Brandt, the strongest influence on Kenna’s work. I was a big fan of the work he produced in the late eighties/ early nineties. Personal and cultural histories leave only their tracks in Kenna’s photographs. You can’t help but get close to Kenna’s unusually small, mostly eight-inch-square, prints. Michael walks through the forests of mist and into the trails of nowhere. My exposure to Japan markedly changed the way I view the world and photograph the world. My first experience of Michael’s work was, along with many people’s I suspect, his photographs of northern Japan; Hokkaido island in particular. Instead of the lurk of shadows and clouds fraught with foreboding, a quiet buoyancy dominates in images like “Usoriyama Lake” (2002), in Osorezan, Honshu, with its seamless, opaline water and sky, interrupted only by a line of pilings, like sumi brush strokes on rice paper. There seems to be a serious question inside these photographs and a near enlightenment  within the same photograph. Within a year, and for the next eight, he was printing for Bernhard. The photo’s crepuscular temperament lends a temporal quality that is at once eternal and evanescent, as if it emergING from a dream. In our fast-paced, modern world, it’s a luxury to be able to watch the stars move across the sky.” We all know we’re going to die, but we don’t know how or when or what happens afterwards. Kenna’s style has something different from western landscape photography. She wrote a very kind and flattering introduction for my new book: Michael Kenna - A Twenty Year Retrospective. “Parks and formal gardens are the ideal places to explore that idea. jet- lagged at two a.m. at a hotel in the Catskills Mountains. Then there are his photos of the kindergarten classroom contents from the Waldorf School attended by his daughter, Olivia (now 18). ... English art and aesthetic theories had a major influence on the development of ideas about landscapes, their construction and representation, not only in Great Britain, but throughout the world. They’ve been structured, contained and harmonized for our distraction,” says Kenna. He took his first stab at it in 1977, I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories.”. “There’s an ominous beauty, a little bit fraught with danger.” He loves to perform his penance usually during dawn or night. Also straying somewhat from his previous work are Kenna’s most recent photos from all over Japan, having traveled there eight times, so far, since the late-1990s. In one, he’d write his name, the date and time, and some observation on pieces of paper, then hide them in the house or park across the street. Six Ticket Counters, Grand Central Station, New York, USA 2000 © Michael Kenna Clin d’Oeil a Brassai, Mont St. Michel, France 1998 © Michael Kenna Viaduct, Berwick, … As a child, he spent hours alone with his imagination inventing games. With access granted to only a few, Kenna scaled to the very top for “Clin d’Oeil a Brassai” (1998), named after a Brassai photograph of Notre Dame. “I may point a finger, but I try not to make judgments,” he says. “We’ve created these stories for ourselves, and all the while water keeps lapping, in a Zen, organic way. Michael Kenna and the Ford River Rouge Complex At the beginning, it was mentioned that the Ford River Rouge Complex has inspired artists since its inception; Diego Rivera completed a set of murals of the plant in the 1930s; Robert Frank photographed the workers of the plant in the 1950s. With clarity and simplicity, Kenna’s images suggest rather than describe, offering up just a few elements of the landscape, leaving it to the viewer to complete the picture. Once there’s someone onstage, all your focus is on that person. A Master Landscape Photographer of our era shows us what raw passion combined with sheer brilliance can deliver. Listening is as important as anything else.” In his photographs of historic rural landscapes, for example, tehre is an air of melancholy, which accompanies memories from the past. Michael feels meeting a new place is gaining a new friendship, thousands of unexplored landscapes in a faraway land just for our masters arrival. He himself has said in many interviews that it is quite normal to follow in the footsteps of your heroes. About 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 convering man’s traces.”, “I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don’t think it’s necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. TB: It’s enlightening, therapeutic and satisfying, because the very process forces me to connect with the world. He himself has said in many interviews that it is quite normal to follow in the footsteps of your heroes. But not as much as the photos of Bill Brandt, the strongest influence on Kenna’s work. Name: Michael Kenna Nationality: British Genre: Landscape, Travel, Commercial, Nudes Born: 1953 (Widnes, Lancashire, England) Resides: San Francisco, California, USA (Since 1978) Michael Kenna’s Style. Kenna’s work often evokes the influences of Romanticism. This all emanates in Kenna’s black-and-white images—of parks and power stations, bridges and Buddhist temples, Easter Island and Auschwitz. More early influences, Michael Kenna. Today Kenna acknowledges the influences of Brandt, Atget, Emerson and Sudek - as well as Americans, Ruth Bernhard, Callahan, Sheeler and Steiglitz - on his personal photography. Michael Kenna fits into this rich historical vein of celebrated landscape artists who have worked in Abruzzo. Michael Kenna: When I was eleven or twelve, I dabbled a bit and made snaps of my friends, family, etc., and even learned how to process my own film and make basic prints in the darkroom. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. “His images hold a mirror to each viewer’s soul and conscience. I keep admiring the beautiful-innocent light, subtle-simple elements and his utterly brilliant placements of them inside a frame. The big element for me was going to Asia in the mid-1980s. His childhood has an immense effect on his way of photography. “In this way, my photos are more like haiku than prose.” Nature’s fluent shapes converge with the geometrics of peoples lives in Kenna’s photos of pathways and piers. Minimalism and simplicity (influenced by Japanese haiku) Black and White; Abstract, Long exposures; Atmospheric, ethereal The book is one of nearly 20 monographs of his work (many of them unfortunately out of print), joining exhibits and gallery representation in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Australia; and public collections in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. These works of art are hard for us to call them photographs for the language it speaks and the silent emotions they provoke. It helps to be ready for them. Michael Kenna has some wonderful books to his name, which are very compelling for any art and photography enthusiast. Kenna acknowledges Brandt’s major influence on his work, along with that of other great European photographers such as Atget, Emerson and Sudek, or Americans with as widely different aesthetic positions as Bernhard, Callahan, Sheeler and Stieglitz. In large part with Kenna's help Coughlin would serve as alderman of the ward for 46 years. Good is in them as much as, and maybe more than, evil,” says Pierre Borhan, director of Patrimoine Photographique, in an email to me. Having watched quite a few videos of our master, the first thing that striked me is the passion and curiosity for him in search of divinity. It’s what’s left behind that I like to photograph.” I also like night light that creates shadows which contain secrets, details break down to become forms and layers of tonality. The photos of Josef Sudek, Eugène Atget, Charles Sheeler and Harry Callahan also shaped Kenna’s work, which stands in contrast to that of Ansel Adams’. “Sometimes the most interesting visual phenomena occur when you least expect it. Once I started travelling to Asia, my influences became Asian. For 12 years, Kenna photographed Nazi concentration camps, visiting 27 of them, sometimes repeatedly, from 1988-2000. And he doesn’t always need film to do it. In his photographs of historic rural landscapes, for example, there is an air of melancholy, which accompanies memories from the past. A Phenomenal Photographer known for his stunning moodaholic monochrome Landscapes. It’s always moving, transforming and uncontrollable.” Then I saw it: A pale membrane of sky reaching luminous past the corpse of night, and above the somber sea, a shimmer of wings. England, Italy, Mexico, Vietnam, India, and many more. An international marathon runner (and, from what I hear, a mean karaoke singer with a knack for Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones), Kenna literally has raced to some of the places he photographs. He photographed theater dress rehearsals, and for record companies and the press; assisted other photographers, and sold stock photos of such luminaries as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cornell Capa, Marc Riboud and Jacques-Henri Lartigue for the John Hilleleson Agency on Fleet Street. Burnished water mirroring a sky mottled in shadow pulls itself toward pilings gathered there like a flock of geese. The most esteemed person in his Northwest England industrial hometown, the priest embodied power, and inhabited that unseen presence inherent in the environment of the church, with its ethereal silence embedded in prayer. While his camera is busy working, Kenna often sacks out in his car or on a park bench, a risky move when it means being jolted out of sleep by the roar of a train, its headlight ruining a perfectly good picture. When I look at this photograph, or any of his, really, I see what he means when he says, “Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.” The images feels real and lacks that overprocessed feel that so easily are made with PS. Possessing such influence despite his short stature and unassuming presence, he and Coughlin constructed a … THANK YOU for a beautiful spotlight! A Phenomenal Photographer known for his stunning moodaholic monochrome Landscapes. Kenna’s work often evokes the influences of Romanticism. If I wasn’t a photographer, I’d still be a traveler.” Nevertheless, it is true. A flock of crows hovers like a cloud above a gauzy expanse of sheep spread along a Wolverton, Buckinghamshire horizon in Kenna’s “Fifty Five Birds” (1991). I love the journey as much as the destination. After further study in London, he worked as a commercial photographer and printer before relocating to the USA. COPYRIGHT 2011-2020 © 121CLICKS.COM. I still consider Michael Kenna one of the daddy's of landscape photography and I believe him to a heavy influence among many other photographers. “Pier Remains” (1990), in Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, is a perfect example. Michael Kenna was and still is a great influence on me: I've learned so much from Michael's work over the decades that I have followed him (I've been a fan since the late 80's). Before that, my influences were European photographers. It’s about the relationship between the exterior and the interior, a potent concoction in a creative human being.” Brandt’s subject matter also resonated with Kenna who recognized in his photos the English gardens and countryside landscapes, and the northern towns in which he had supported his local rugby league team. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. “We may feel connected, but we come here alone and leave alone, with no idea of what will happen next. An amazing view for us to discover how passionate this man is towards art and nature. “The whole object of the game was to see how long it took before I went back to find them,” he says. The sense of touch with every page and photograph will remain forever. Kenna is well known for his night photography. There are many question marks, and I like photographing them.” It gives room for his imagination, and ours, to try to answer. In his early years of education, he attended the Banbury School of Art, where he took up studies in painting and photography. By Claire Sykes Ever since, Kenna’s influence has been spreading across China. The Paris photography organization included Kenna’s photos in their 2001 group exhibition, “Mémoire des Camps.” The year before, Kenna donated 300 of his 6,000 negatives and prints (and their rights) to the French Ministry of Culture. “In such a large landscape, it’s very difficult for me to feel the presence, the memory of humans, and the sense of impending action.” Raised in a small country with little wilderness, he prefers instead the re àlationship between humans and a more intimate landscape. Kenna’s work often evokes the influences of Romanticism. “People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. Kenna tried his hand at Yosemite and Yellowstone, but his photos of them “didn’t add anything. First, he’d serve as an altar boy and attend seminary school (for seven years, until age 17), with dreams of the priesthood. Genuine, authentic, wonderful photography!! “Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes,” he continues. As one of 6 children born to a working class Irish-Catholic family, he initially aspired to enter the priesthood but his passion for the arts led him to The Banbury School of Art where he studied painting and then photography. Michael Kenna, internationally celebrated for landscape photography, has this year produced Rafu, a collection of nude photographs.In his treatment of one of the great themes for artists through the ages we see that, though the subject has changed, Kenna’s vision persists. He prefers to work in black-and-white, viewing it as “more mysterious than color. The British photographer Michael Kenna deeply impressed Chinese viewers with genuine originality in his solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2007. Michael Kenna is one of the most influential landscape photographer of his generation, photographing for 50 years, best known for his black & white landscapes. Michael Kenna Biography. Michael Kenna was and still is a great influence on me: I've learned so much from Michael's work over the decades that I have followed him (I've been a fan since the late 80's). Hilltop Trees by Michael Kenna. In his photographs of historic rural landscapes, for example, there is an air of melancholy, which accompanies memories from the past. Inspired by the close-up contemplations of museum specimens and jellyfish in the photos by his wife, Camille Solyagua, Kenna took a turn in subject matter with this take on childhood. For more on his books, including Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective, Hokkaido, and Night Work, see michaelkenna.net Michael has several upcoming exhibitions, including Hokkaido Exhibition at Shin Sapporo Gallery, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, from Oct 19-31, and as part of group exhibition Comme une Respiration at the Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg in … The more you get yourself out there, whether you wake up at 5:00 a.m. to pouring rain or not, the more you’re likely to experience the wonderful happenings that are going on all around you,” he says. He abandoned those in his teen years and discovered his talent for art, unheard of in his family who would have considered his interest an improbable livelihood option. Stone steps stretched at an angle climb up to a giant, shadowed vessel, and in the distance, a row of conical topiary trees jab into a hazy hillside, in “Covered Urn, Study I” (1987), taken in Versailles, France. Instead, I like giving room to imagine yourself onstage, with the landscape as the place where your own dramas can unfold.” Like weeds strangling a neglected lawn, a heap of wire-rimmed eyeglasses lay snarled and knotted in Auschwitz. In my early work, I used a lot of darkness, a lot of shadows. The same goes for photographing, as if Kenna knew he was practicing then for the lifelong profession he had yet to realize. Here, light originating at the mount’s base braids itself up through fractured isosceles shapes fanned out in shades of gray. A great deal of Michael’s personality is always in his photographs.” Though empty of people, his photos of intimate landscapes are filled with the evidence of humanity. Those empty stadiums and abandoned mills, places of silence fascinated him much further and Michael always wanted to capture the invisible behind the visible. Photographing at night has given me a whole new palate to work with.” It is unfortunately a little ‘twee’ perhaps to list him as an influence as everyone is likely to say “well, duh! “I like the confrontation between the two,” he tells me. In 1972, while I was doing a foundation art course at the Banbury School of Art in Oxfordshire, England, I was introduced to the notion that photography could be a means of self-expression or visual exploration. It may be a quest to capture the unseen or an exploration towards much bigger things. Michael Kenna (British, b.1953) is a photographer who was born in Widnes, England, and is best known for his photographs of black-and-white landscapes. Born (in 1953) and raised in the chemical manufacturing town of Widnes, Lancashire, Kenna grew up with five siblings in a poor, working-class, Irish-Catholic family. In “Cloud Shadows, Study 2” (1998), taken in Mont St. Michel, Normandy, France, two silhouetted steeples of this medieval Benedictine abbey lunge into a gossamer luminosity that veils the structure’s uppermost phantom-like spires. Having been exhibited all over the globe and having travelled to numerous countries with rich natural beauty, It is interesting to learn that Michael Kenna was initially trained as a priest before he actually took up photography once moving to london. His next project has him following the Pilgrim Trail, in Shikoku, spending a month in Buddhist temples, the subject of yet another Nazraeli Press book, due in 2005. “I like to go for at least a week or two, to give me time to adjust to the rhythm of the place and my own creativity.” He tends to return again and again, photographing the familiar in different ways each time, as he did for ten years with Calais, France and its lace factories. As a result, there’s never any question about whose work it is. By alan frost on June 19, 2018 I believe that all creative people, whether they are painters, sculptors or indeed photographers can be inspired by viewing the work of the most famous and successful artists in their field of expertise. For me it’s the act of photographing. Aiming his camera at a swing set, he bracketed from 1/30 of a second to one hour. A part of 1st Ward politics for more than 60 years, Kenna possessed great influence on the municipal affairs of Chicago, being able to make or break the prospects of Democratic candidates for the mayoralty. The equation shifted. Following the patchwork-concrete bank of an inky industrial canal, a broken-stone walkway hobbles along with the help of a white wooden handrail guiding it past the opaque angularity of buildings and off the photograph’s edge. He’s always off for somewhere else. His images of ruins stir up feelings of passing time, of the constantly evolving ties between history and nature. “It was all about time, change, memory and patience.” ALL RIGHT RESERVED, The World’s 50 Best Photos of The Year by Agora, Street Photography & The Art of Composition – 30 Majestic Photographs (Part 16), IPF Portrait Prize 2020: Winners & Finalists Of The Contest, Beautiful Dog Photos By Polish Photographer Alicja Zmyslowska, 15 Beautiful Photography Websites Powered by WordPress, How to give titles for your Photographs – Tips and Examples, Tanter Ghor: Home To Six Yards Of Grace And Beyond – Photo Story By Cheryl Mukherji, Feel the Springtime – Super soft photographs by Rachel Bellinsky. His photos concentrate on the interaction between ephemeral atmospheric condition of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass. Taking inspiration – An interview with Michael Kenna. The glassy rows in “Painting Jars” (1994) and the light-drenched marbles in “Games in the Sun” (1997) crouch down to a child’s eye level. The story Chris Pichler of Portland, publisher of Nazraeli Press based in Tucson, Arizona, tells is one of the “ghost-like presence” that he feels in Kenna’s work, especially his industrial landscapes. In a sense it’s like meditation. Kenna keeps the soul in his work, perfect but still human. Author of some wonderful books Michael Kenna continues to inspire us through his astounding art creations. I loved seeing that photography isn’t all about the exterior world. In the mid-1980s, Kenna began photographing French and English formal gardens such as this (and the Désert de Retz, an 18th-century landscape garden west of Paris with its medley of ruins), as an homage to Atget and his series of park images from the outskirts of Paris. The process of photographing becomes more meaningful and complex, because it encourages self-reflection. “Sometimes he just wanted to say thank you to the trees. Michael Kenna fits perfectly into this rich historical vein of celebrated landscape artists who have worked in Abruzzo. Of his collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 1976 exhibit, The Land he says, “I saw an extremely powerful atmosphere, in his skies full of nostalgia and melancholy, his profound use of night photography with dark shadows and no details, and his sense of melodrama. Chasing time and unexplainable silence just to be felt amongst a land of islands, a must watch video. Kenna’s shorter, daytime exposures soften the fluidity of water, a common element in his work, especially when juxtaposed with the rigid structures of humanity. “I felt repulsion, and a powerful intrigue. It’s a reflection or interpretation of reality, since most of us see in color all the time.” “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. So I think that’s why, a long time ago, I consciously tried to let go of artist’s angst, and instead just hope for the best and enjoy it. When you make four-hour exposures in the middle of the night, you inevitably slow down and begin to observe and appreciate more what’s going on around you. It’s also well paid and has enabled me to work on other projects.” Occasionally, Kenna thinks of somewhere he’d like to visit, and three weeks later he’s there, like Easter Island. Michael Kenna - Order of the Landscape. And I thought to myself, What would Kenna’s camera do with this moment? “But if these photographs let us remember the Nazi barbarism, they also suggest the peace. A Master Landscape Photographer of our era shows us what raw passion combined with sheer brilliance can deliver. Dead vines choke a barbed wire fence in Gross Rosen. It’s no surprise that as a child Michael Kenna wanted to someday be a priest. - Michael Kenna - On the question: "So, you’ve essentially structured the practical and pragmatic part of your production process to make it interfere as little as possible with your creative life" in "LensWork Interview" 10th Anniversary Issue No. I did not mention her under influences, but she has been a very powerful one. Says Wirtz, “You can feel the impending presence and absence in his work, due to his coming and going.” He’s a pictorialist, in the modern sense of someone who creates pictures with real feeling. Greatly influenced by the transformation of negative to final print undertaken by Bernhard, Kenna patiently makes every print himself, burning and dodging to perfect the balance of each image. Kenna travels around the world constantly photographing the varied landscapes of the planet, including China, the United States of America, Brazil, Czech Republic and Egypt. To translate words of emotions through monochrome landscapes is an innovation into our medium of photography. Which I believe only a few photographers have been able to achieve out of their own originality. Ruth is a remarkable and unique woman, a fine photographer, teacher and inspiration, and I'm honored to say, friend. Listening to the photographs from a book is always an eternal feeling. The hand-stuffed dolls in “Marie-Lise and Tom-Bu-La” (1994) gaze at us with utter faith in the make-believe. Michael was born in Widnes, Cheshire, in 1953 and discovered photography at art school. While pursuing his hobby of landscape photography (pretty pastoral scenes to escape from his industrial roots), he took every chance to practice his craft, commercially. Michael Kenna – Inspiration from Masters of Photography. It started at Banbury, with the mountain of shaving brushes that emerged from the communal developer tray in a photo by a fellow student who had taken a bus tour in Poland. 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