Michael Kenna
Michael Kenna (British, b. 1953) was born in Widnes, England. Celebrated as one of the world’s most prominent landscape photographers, Kenna is known for his poetic black & white images from around the globe. His mysterious photographs, often made at dawn or in the dark hours of night, concentrate primarily on the interaction between the natural landscape and human-made structures. Kenna is both a diurnal and nocturnal photographer, fascinated by times of day when light is at its most pliant. His long time-exposures, which might last throughout the night, often record details in the photographs that the human eye is not able to perceive.
Kenna is particularly famous for the intimate scale of his photography and his meticulous personal printing style. He works in the traditional, non-digital, photographic medium. His exquisitely hand crafted black and white prints, which he still makes himself in his darkroom, reflect a sense of refinement, respect for history, and thorough originality.
During Kenna’s career, his photographs have been shown in nearly 500 one-person gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the world, and are included in over one hundred permanent institutional collections, including; The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Michael Kenna received the prestigious Officer des Arts et des Lettres medal in Paris in 2022.
Over ninety monographs and exhibition catalogs have been published on Kenna’s work, including Michael Kenna – A Twenty Year Retrospective (Treville, 1994 and Nazraeli Press, 2000); Impossible to Forget (Marval and Nazraeli Press, 2001); Japan (Nazraeli Press and Treville Editions, 2003); Michael Kenna – A Retrospective (BnF, 2009); China (Posts and Telecom Press, 2014); France (Nazraeli Press, 2014); Forms of Japan (Prestel, 2015); Rouge (Prestel 2016); Rafu (Nazraeli Press and Shuppan Kyodosha, 2018), Beyond Architecture – Michael Kenna (Prestel 2019) ; Buddha (Prestel 2020); Northern England 1983-1986 (Nazraeli Press 2021); Flesh of Stone (Noir Editions 2022); Arbres/Trees (Skira Editions 2022).
MICHAEL KENNA
Officier des Arts et des Lettres Award by the Ministry of Culture in Paris, France
On November 10, 2022, I was absolutely delighted and extremely proud to be awarded the decoration of Officier des Arts et des Lettres at Paris Photo by Rima Abdul Malak, the Minister of Culture in France. At that time, she also announced the donation of my life archive to be housed by the French state at the Mediatheque de Photographie et Patrimoine (MPP) at Fort Saint-Cyr in Montigny-le Bretonneux (Yvelines). The donation included 3,683 original silver gelatin photographic prints of images made in 43 different countries, along with their accompanying negatives and scans, 175,000 other negatives accompanied by their corresponding contact sheets, 6,422 working prints from the years 1983-2000, 1,280 Polaroid prints, 87 books and monographs printed on my work and all the archives relating to my artistic activity for the past 50 years.
Why MPP in France? The simple answer is that I have had a love affair with France since the very beginning of my career. Looking objectively, France is the country where I have photographed most, and there are more photographs from France in the donation than from any other country. Also, the 300 prints and 6,000 negatives from the Concentration Camp project made in the years 1988-2000 have already been donated to France over two decades ago. It was important to me that my whole archive would be situated in one place and it is very comforting to know that my work will now rest alongside the oevres of photographers that I love and admire, such as Jacques Henri Lartigue, Andre Kertesz, Willy Ronis and others. I am enormously appreciative that the MPP has accepted my work and will help to protect it against the ravages of time.
It should be noted that I retain complete, full and unrestricted use of my negatives and all usage rights during my life time. The negatives will only be transferred on my death. In most respects, nothing has changed, except that I now have great peace of mind both for myself and for my heirs that I will not be leaving behind a messy mountain of prints and negatives when I eventually fly with the angels. For the forseeable future, I hope and trust that it will be “business as usual” for Michael Kenna Photography.
- Michael Kenna
https://mediatheque-patrimoine.culture.gouv.fr