Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna (b. 1953) is one of the most distinctive contemporary landscape photographers, whose atmospheric black-and-white images have earned him an international reputation for their contemplative quiet and refined aesthetic. Born in Widnes, England, Kenna pursued his photographic training at the Banbury School of Art and the London College of Printing, receiving a thorough grounding in the technical and aesthetic traditions of the medium. He later moved to the United States, working as an assistant to the celebrated photographer Ruth Bernhard in San Francisco, an experience that deepened his engagement with the disciplined West Coast tradition of fine art photography.

Kenna's mature photographs are instantly recognizable for their signature square format, small print sizes, and hauntingly minimal compositions. Working almost exclusively in black and white, he uses extended exposures, sometimes as long as ten hours, to capture landscapes bathed in soft ambient light, mist, or the quiet stillness of pre-dawn hours. His images characteristically feature a single tree, a wooden pier, a snow-covered field, or a distant industrial structure isolated within a broader atmospheric field, and the extreme reduction of visual elements gives each picture the meditative quality of a haiku.

Kenna has traveled the world in pursuit of his subjects, producing extended series devoted to the landscapes of Hokkaido in Japan, the formal gardens of André Le Nôtre in France, the industrial cooling towers of Ratcliffe Power Station in England, and the eerie stillness of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a project he pursued over many years as a memorial to the millions who perished there. His work brings together a distinctly Eastern sensibility of restraint and contemplation with the great European tradition of Romantic landscape photography.

Kenna has published numerous monographs and his photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and other major international museums. He has been a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, and he continues to work prolifically from his studio in the Pacific Northwest.