Michael Kenna (photographer)

Michael Kenna (photographer)
Michael Kenna (born 1953) is an English photographer best known for his unusual black and white landscapes featuring ethereal light achieved by photographing at dawn or at night with exposures of up to 10 hours. His photos concentrate on the interaction between ephemeral atmospheric condition of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass.
Many books have been published of his work, the subjects of which range from The Rouge, in Dearborn Michigan, to the snow-covered island of Hokkaido, Japan. Kenna's work is also held in permanent collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Biography
Kenna was born in 1953 in the industrial town of Widnes in the northwest of England. Kenna grew up with five siblings in a poor, working-class, Irish-Catholic family. He attended seminary school for seven years (until age 17), with the intention of becoming a priest. After discovering his talent for art, he decided against joining the holy priesthood in favor of a more creative career, despite the fact that his family would not have considered his interest a realistic livelihood option.
After a year at the Banbury School of Art, where he received his first photographic instruction, Kenna applied to the London College of Printing in both the graphic design and commercial photography departments, figuring he would go with the one that accepted him first (he graduated from the latter, in 1976). While pursuing his hobby of landscape photography, he took every chance to practice his craft commercially. He photographed theater dress rehearsals, and for record companies and the press; assisted other photographers, and sold stock photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cornell Capa, Marc Riboud and Jacques-Henri Lartigue for the John Hillelson Agency on Fleet Street.
In 1977, Kenna moved to San Francisco for the opportunity to show and sell his work in galleries. There, he met Ruth Bernhard, who hired him as her printer in 1977. Over the next eight years, she introduced him to the creative potential of the printing process, in her unique methods of manipulating and interpreting a negative.
Work
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. The main exception was for the photographs in Monique's Kindergarten for which a 4×5 large format camera was employed.
His work has been shown in galleries and museum exhibitions in Asia, Australia and Europe. He has photographs 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 has also done commercial work for such clients as Volvo, Rolls-Royce, Audi, Sprint, Dom Perignon and The Spanish Tourism Board.
In 2000, the Ministry of Culture in France made Kenna a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters.
Publications
Michael Kenna Photographs. Stephen Wirtz Gallery and The Weston Gallery, 1984
The Hound of the Baskervilles. Arion, 1985; Northpoint, 1986
1976-1986. Gallery Min, 1987
Night Walk. Friends of Photography, 1988
Michael Kenna. Min Gallery, 1990
Le Desert de Retz. Arion, 1990
The Elkhorn Slough and Moss Landing. The Elkhorn Slough Foundation, 1991
A Twenty Year Retrospective. Treville, 1994; Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2002
The Rouge. Ram, 1995
The Silverado Squatters. Arion, 1996
Monique's Kindergarten. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 1997
Le Notre's Gardens. The Huntington Library, Art Collections Library and RAM Publishing, 1997 and 1999
Night Work. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2000
Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After. Marval; Nazraeli, 2001
Easter Island. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2001
Japan. Portland, OR: Nazraeli; Treville, 2002
Calais Lace. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2003
Boarding School. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2003
Ratcliffe Power Station. OR: Nazraeli, 2004
Retrospective Two. Portland, OR: Nazraeli; Treville, 2004
Hokkaido. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2005
Montecito Garden. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2007
Mont St Michel. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2007
Mont-Saint-Michel. 21st, 2007
Images of the Seventh Day, 2011
In France. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2012
Abruzzo. Italy, OR: Nazraeli, 2017
One Sunday in Beijing. Paris: Bessard, 2018. Edition of 700 copies.
Beyond Architecture. Prestel, NY, London, Munich. 2019
Northern England 1983–1986. Paso Robles, California: Nazraeli, 2021. .
Awards
Imogen Cunningham Award, San Francisco, California, USA, 1981
Art in Public Buildings Award, California Arts Council Commission, Sacramento, California, USA, 1987
Institute for Aesthetic Development Award, Pasadena, California, USA, 1989
Golden Saffron Award, Consuegra, Spain, 1996
Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, Ministry of Culture, France, 2000
Honorary Master of Arts, Brooks Institute, Santa Barbara, California, USA, 2003
Hae-sun Lee Photography Award, Photographic Artist Association of Korea, Seoul, Korea, 2013
Special Photographer Award, Higashikawa, Hokkaido, Japan, 2016
References
External links
Interview with Kenna by Tim Baskerville
About Monique's Kindergarten by John Paul Caponigro
1953 births
Photographers from Lancashire
Photography in Japan
Living people
People from Widnes