Michael Kenna
"Japan: A Love Story"
About Michael Kenna
Michael Kenna is a British photographer whose black-and-white landscapes — made over five decades and across dozens of countries — are among the most recognizable in contemporary photography. His signatures are patience and reduction: exposures lasting minutes or hours, often at night or in falling snow, that strip a scene to its essential forms. A single tree in a white field. A pier dissolving into mist. Power lines crossing an empty sky. Kenna works with film and a Hasselblad, prints small and dark by hand, and has published over fifty monographs — a pace and consistency few photographers match. His long relationship with Japan, in particular, has produced some of his most celebrated work: Hokkaido winters reduced to calligraphy, fence posts and torii gates standing in silence. The images featured here are characteristic of his approach — minimal, meditative, and made slowly. In an era of infinite frames and instant results, Kenna's work is a reminder of what photography can do when it is given time: not just record a place, but distill it.
Japan has a long and rich tradition of reciprocal gift giving. I have been the grateful recipient of so much over so many years in Japan, and I know that I will never be able to give back in equal measure. I hope this work can be seen as a small token of my desire to do so. I also hope this work can be viewed as a homage to Japan and that it will serve to symbolize my immense ongoing appreciation and deep gratitude for this beautiful an mysterious country.
