Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna (photographer)


Michael Kenna (born 1953) is an English photographer best known for his black & white landscapes.
Kenna attended Upholland College in Lancashire, the Banbury School of Art in Oxfordshire, and the London College of Printing. In the 1980s, Kenna moved to San Francisco and worked as Ruth Bernhard's printer.
Kenna's photography focuses on unusual landscapes with ethereal light achieved by photographing at dawn or at night with exposures of up to 10 hours. Since about 1986 he has mainly used Hasselblad medium format cameras and this accounts for the square format of most of his photographs.  The main exception was for the photographs in Monique's Kindergarten for which a 5 x 4 large format camera was employed.
His work has been shown in galleries and museum exhibitions in Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. He also has photographs included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Patrimoine photographique in Paris, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His photography of the ruins of concentration camps was featured in the opening credits of the Holocaust film Esther's Diary (2010).
In 2000, the Ministry of Culture in France made Kenna a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters.
In 2006, Kenna wrote the preface to Humans, a photo-series by Iranian photographer Mohammadreza Mirzaei.

자연과 대화하고 호흡하는 작가, 멋진 사진을 만들기 위해 셔터를 누르기 보다 자연과 일체화되는 과정을 보여준다. 작가의 철학과 결과물인 사진 모두가 동약적인 냄새가 물씬 풍긴다. 봄이 오는 과정에서 다소 차갑고 무거워 보이긴하나 보는사람으로 하여금 숙연하고,
때론 가슴이 시리게 만든다. 어찌됐건 좋은 사진, 영화, 건축, 가구, 연극, 패션, 모든 예술은 사람의 마음을 움직이게 하는게 아닐까?  한 분야의 기술적이고 학술적인것들과 상관없이, 그것이 긍정적이든 부정적이든..이사진들은 나에게 다시 카메라를 잡고 싶은 마음을 들게 하였으니..