shashasha

The monograph “Michael Kenna: Photographs and Stories,” printed on Japanese Kasadaka paper and bound in custom deep blue cloth, celebrates Michael Kenna’s fiftieth year as a photographer.
For the book, Kenna has selected one image for each year beginning 1973, when he enrolled in the Banbury School of Art, and for each subsequent year. Following the “Photographs” section is “Stories,” in which Kenna gives context to each image and considers how it connected to his own life at the time.

“This book is a journey, navigating places foreign and familiar, winding through black and white scenes full of spacious calm. It is a great pleasure to look at these images, to feel that maybe everything is going to be all right after all, that the world isn’t such a bad place, and magic still exists. There is a reassuring quality to these photographs, and I, for one, am grateful for Michael Kenna’s half century of watching the light and recording his vision.”
― from the introduction by Ann Jastrab

Michael Kenna is arguably the most influential landscape photographer of his generation. Often working at dawn or during the night, he has concentrated primarily on the interaction between the ephemeral atmospheric conditions of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass. Over ninety books and catalogs have been published on his work. His exquisite, hand crafted, silver gelatin prints have been exhibited throughout the world and are included in such permanent museum collections as The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 2022, Mr. Kenna was made an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture.