MICHAEL KENNA
Michael Kenna (born 1953, Widnes, Lancashire, England) is a British photographer whose spare, contemplative black-and-white landscapes have earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive and meditative practitioners of the medium in the contemporary era. Raised in the industrial northwest of England, he studied at the Banbury School of Art and the London College of Printing, graduating with distinction in 1976. In 1977 he moved to San Francisco, where he met the photographer Ruth Bernhard and served as her assistant and printmaker for eight years, an apprenticeship that instilled in him a profound commitment to the craft of darkroom printing and a deep attentiveness to light, atmosphere, and the passage of time.
Working predominantly at dawn or through the night with exposures of up to ten hours, Kenna produces images that dissolve the boundary between the natural and the constructed, between the transient and the permanent. His subjects range from the industrial ruins of the English midlands and the war memorials of Normandy to the gardens of Versailles and the landscapes of Japan, where he has worked extensively over several decades.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.