Michael Kenna

Since his first visit to Japan in 1987, British photographer Michael Kenna (born 1953) has returned time and again to capture Asia's landscapes. The poetic power of Kenna's photographs and their ability to extract emotion from the landscape—from the dignity of a tree or a rock—has led some commentators to describe them as visual haikus.
Silver Haikus provides a thematic retrospective of his work in Asia over the last 40 years. It explores the connection between his aesthetic and Asian art through formal dialogues between his photographs and works from the Chinese, Korean and Japanese collections of the Musée Guimet. More specifically, this book observes the influence of Asian arts in Kenna's work: the choice of monochrome, the economy of means, the use of emptiness and the desire to suggest rather than describe evoke the ink paintings of Chinese scholars and Japanese Zen monks.

Best known for his unusual black-and-white landscapes, British photographer Michael Kenna (born 1953) creates these ethereal images by setting up 10-hour exposures across night and day, creating prolonged concentrations on the ephemeral and atmospheric conditions of the natural world and its interactions with manmade structures. His work has been shown in almost 500 solo exhibitions and more than 400 group exhibitions, and is in more than 100 permanent collections.
Constellation, marking the 50th anniversary of Kenna's career, includes 122 breathtaking images from Kenna's oeuvre of 3,700 photographs captured across 43 countries from 1973 to 2024—each active year and country visited is represented. From this constellation of photographs, the reader is invited to chart their own universe of poetry and beauty away from the tyranny of snapshots.

British photographer Michael Kenna’s (born 1953) practice is characterized by long exposure times of up to several hours. This technique allows him to capture the unseen details hidden between the serene canals and stately brick houses that constitute the Venetian landscape. His lens captures a wide array of subjects: mist-shrouded chapels and attics, falling stars above bell towers, palace arches, clotheslines, gondola prows, bridges, garden statues and twisted poles emerging from a black lagoon. Kenna’s photographs skillfully play with light, shadow and reflection to show the poetic intensity of Venice. This photobook serves as a new chapter in Kenna’s illustrious career. It stands as a testament to his unparalleled ability to capture the timeless allure of the Floating City, offering viewers a unique and immersive experience through the lens of an exacting master.

Published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France, this catalog gathers a stunning selection of photographs of trees by English-born, Seattle-based photographer Michael Kenna (born 1953). For over 40 years, Kenna has been traveling around the world with his camera immortalizing trees and forests in his signature ethereal lighting, which he achieves by working in the early morning and late-night hours, and through his use of extremely long exposure times, often lasting up to 10 hours. Captured exclusively in black and white, these idyllic images are divorced from both seasonal and geographical context, emphasizing the diversity and plurality of the photographed specimens. On rare occasions, the existence of human civilizations peeks through in his work: some road sections, buildings, fences and stakes or, more surprisingly, slippers, constitute the only traces of human presence. This flattening of setting and simplification of subject allows us to reimagine the colors that are traditionally associated with trees and focus on the interaction between the opaque, delicate black of their branches and the fleecy light that filters through them, generating the wonderful atmospheric effect so distinctive to Kenna’s photography.

A beautifully designed monograph surveying the works of the highly acclaimed contemporary photographer. Kenna’s photographs captivate viewers through their silent drama and magnetism: rather than being accurate descriptions of a place, the photographer seems interested in capturing the invisible lines which enclose space, and in so doing arousing a viewer’s imagination and reverie. This catalog showcases 290 black-and-white photographs: 200 trace the artist’s career, from early 1970s images shot in England, to the photographs of the following three decades, which result from travels and commissions in every continent throughout the world; 35 record Venice’s everlasting appeal; 20 reflect one of Kenna’s most important jobs, that of recording the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Michael Kenna was born in England in 1953 but has been living in the United States for thirty years. Of the many showings of his works that have been held in public venues and private galleries, mention should be made particularly of those in museums in France, Japan and the United States, the latest being in the French National Library, Paris, in 2009. Sandro Parmiggiani is an art historian and art critic. He is also the curator of hundreds of exhibitions in Italy and abroad.