Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna

“what impresses you most when you look through his very vast series of landscape pictures is the extraordinary intactness of the luminous atmosphere.”

Ferdinando Scianna from Images of the Seventh Day, Skirra Photography

I must admit to skimming over Michael Kennas work for a few years, never really looking into it until I eventually looked at is website.  This details 73 publications, reams of solo and group exhibitions and a staggering amount of gallery representations.  Add to this a raft of blue chip companies that he has produced black and white commercial work for and it seems I have missed one of the leading forces in contemporary landscape photography.

Scianna describes Kenna’s work as ‘post-documentary’ and ‘neo-pictorialist’.  Post-documentary – from reading an essay by Martha Rossler my understanding of this term is at total odds with its use as a descriptor for Kenna’s images.  Rosler would define post-documentary as being free from the aesthetics that influence the viewers interpretation, and free from manipulation.  Kenna chooses the viewpoint to carefully edit the vista to fit his compositional style.  He may not be post processing images in Photoshop most of the time, but the severely extended exposure times, and the refinements made during the darkroom process, are every bit a manipulation of the image as others would carry out digitally.

My understanding of neo-pictorialism is that it defines images created by the likes of Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson – the manufactured tableaux style image.  Possibly Kenna could be described this way, his images are certainly constructed in that he is using time – long exposures – as the method of modifying the images and creating the artificial tableaux in the same manner that Crewdson would use filmic devices.

The early work shows a prevalent influence of Brandt, even to the point of homage.  This developed into a much more Atget type style, the long exposures removing the human presence from the scene.  Topiaries in misty parks with deserted gravel paths clearly demonstrate the Atget influence.  Over a thirty year span Kenna’s style as varied, along with subject matter, but the long exposures appears to have remained a constant (along with the square format).  Here has been a brief flirtation with still lives and a series on cooling towers, which would seem to be an influence on photographers such as Ian Bramham.  The more recent images show the influence of Japanese photographers.

The current extreme exposures that remove all tonal detail from water and sky are the closest to the neo-pictorialist ideal.  The scene is a fabrication in that the majority of the tones are a creation, in the same manner that Crewdson manipulates the scene using theatrical lighting and post production techniques, or Wall will compile the scene from separate image files.

So where do Kenna’s images fit this research?  Like Cooper he is photographing the remains of man’s activities on the landscape.  This may be a subtle as a fence post protruding from the snow, or as blatant as a city.  Man is not the subject, it is his relationship with the landscape, the ritualistic activity.  Unlike Cooper his work is brighter, more optimistic.  He portrays the activity as a symbiotic relationship, a coexistence.  In Kenna’s images man is just another aspect to the landscape, he is often less important than the natural subject matter, a tree will be treated with more reverence than a structure.  I would place Kenna as being diametrically opposed to Cooper and Hill in that they both emphasise the passing of man.  This could be a remnant of a building for Cooper, or an intersection of pathways on a hillside for Hill, but both acknowledge man as having an active part in the landscape.  I often feel that Kenna sees man as much more transient, a traveller passing through soon to be forgotten.