Huangshan Mountains, Study 2, Anhui, China, 2008 © Michael Kenna
Bernheimer Fine Art Haldenstr. 11 6006 Lucerne Suisse
Recent work, Michael Kenna's second one-man show at Bernheimer Fine Art Photography, invites the visitor to travel through five continents. From Venice to the Pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt, and from the Huangshan Mountains in China and the island of Hokkaido in Japan to views of Georgia, Brazil and Mexico, we can appreciate Kenna's feeling for landscape across the globe.
Venice, "The City of Light", has always been an attractive subject for Kenna because of the interplay between light and water. In March 2010, Nazraeli Press published a detailed catalogue of the artist's images of the city from the last thirty years. Moving South to North Africa, Kenna was deeply impressed by the Pyramids of Gizeh. Since his first exhibition in Japan in 1987, Kenna has been fascinated by the country and returned there a number of times, such that it features quite prominently in his oeuvre. The clear simple compositions of his images of Japan are never cluttered with unnecessary detail, rather they possess a calm, almost meditative quality. Kenna presents familiar places in a way that transforms them into something new, opening up the spectator's eye to an unexpected, enchanted world.
Michael Kenna is one of the most famous international landscape photographers. Of his approach to photography, he explains: "The camera is recording the passage of time, something which the eye cannot see." He defines his task as a photographer as collecting experiences for others. For that, he uses very long exposure times of several hours. He says that the act of making a photo is much more important than the photo itself. For over twenty years he has been using old fashioned Hasselblads, fully manual. Instead of digital image progressing, he is editing the negative in the darkroom, which is an essential part of his work. He realizes his black-and-white-images during the dawn or even at night. The format of his images is very untypical for contemporary photography: it is mostly 20 x 20 cm.
In autumn 2009, there was a big Retroperspective of Kenna's work in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. While Kenna is shown at Bernheimer Fine Art Photography, there is another exhibition in the Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia beginning in May 2010. Michael Kenna's photographs are represented in a lot of public collections, for example in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery in London or in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Michael Kenna lives and works in Seattle, Washington, USA. In Germany Michael Kenna is exclusively represented by Bernheimer Fine Art Photography.