Michael Kenna

and you know when I was plotting out what I wanted to do this month with episodes I intentionally put sebastio sagato in the last episode and Michael Kenna to run back to back and you know I think it's an interesting pairing because for me um you know the only commonality these two photographers have is that they both shoot black and white work and that they both kind of have the sense of Fine Art but they're radically different they're 180° apart from one another other than those two things uh sebastio sagato is this intense individual this very leftist personality um who brings this intensity to his photographs that are very reflective of his personality and by goal he is going to change the world with his camera lens and I love that I think it's beautiful I think it's intense um I love that kind of fire that that that comes out of a guy like sasio sagato Michael Kenna though on the other side of the spectrum couldn't be any different I mean he's a complete 180 from sagato and Michael Kenna is more of this Zen Buddhist kind of thought uh minimalist compositions very meditative in nature and I think they really speak um to something very deep down in our souls as people who enjoy this type of Photography and the reason I put these two people back to back is for me um I think that this is when photography becomes such a beautiful thing when you have different personalities uh that all kind of contribute to this this U this world that that we all know as photography and I think that that's absolutely brilliant um Michael Kenna has go on gone on record several times as stating that you know he spent a lot of time alone as a kid uh he prefers to work that way these days um he likes to go out and take his time with things um you know to shoot photography all night sometimes uh you know to wait for the right times of day and to really take it in from you know this very Zen school of thought and I think with I have some more to say on this but without further Ado probably you best to go look at some images so this is the work of Michael [Music] Kenna Michael Kenna was born in Northwest England in 1953 at an early age he found interest in his surroundings spending time alone as he says living in his imagination at the park railway station and the church in his early years he expressed an interest in becoming a priest he attended a Catholic Seminary boarding school before going on to the Banbury School of Art in Oxfordshire for a year before taking a three-year course in photography at the London College of printing Kenna switched from pain ing to photography because he felt it was a more practical way to earn a living after taking jobs as a commercial photographer Kenna's interest in Fine Art began after seeing a bill Brandt Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975 titled the land Brandt became a major influence on Michael's work among others such as Harry Callahan Charles sheer and Alfred stet in 1976 he visited the United States to try to get his work seen the next few years proved to be difficult as he worked as an assistant and printer while developing his own style he eventually landed a job in San Francisco printing for Ruth Bernard where he spent many years collaborating and perfecting his printing skills burnhard proved to be a valuable Mentor as Kenna learned the photography business and made contacts at Galleries and museums Ruth was also a perfectionist for Quality with Printing and Kenneth spent over 10 years working with her mastering the craft in 1981 Kenna held his first solo exhibition in San Francisco his career has evolved into a series of location themed large-scale series work of which he often juggles up to 10 projects at a time though these projects are often marked with book releases and exhibitions Kenna will often revisit his work as there is always more to continue one such example was a series of prints and negatives which he donated to the state of France documenting World War II concentration camp sites the project took over 10 years before the donation but Kenna states that to this day it's still interest him to continue to date Kenna has published over 25 books and won honors and awards including Chevalier of the order of arts and letters in 2000 by the French Ministry of culture Kenna's work takes him on a global scale to locations including Europe England Japan China and the Easter Islands he currently lives in Seattle [Music] Washington [Music] so we're going to look at some work here today and for this example I have chosen to use my copy of the Michael Kenna the 20-year retrospective now there are two volumes of this this is volume one there is a volume two of this the reason I have selected this is because I want to look at some of Kenna's earlier work because I think it makes sense to see where he's coming come from and what you're going to realize in here that for Kenna um you know a life's body of work is not a Sprint it's a marathon and this is a wonderful book uh easy to find uh it's not one of the real collectible Kenna books but what's interesting to me here and this is the first image that's in the book and this is from 1975 this is Richmond Sur England and you can see that there is a little bit of a difference between the more modern work that Kenna has done which a lot of which I showed during the biography and some of this early work um you don't see the square format for instance um some of this was done 4x5 some of it may be 35 mm I'm not exactly certain on that but I believe uh 4x5 and and 6x6 were the two formats he shot the most of 6x6 being what he settled on uh in the modern day um but you can already see you know this a Zen minimalism kind of approach here uh you know where you have this beautiful printing technique of almost pure black at the bottom to you get kind of pure white sort of in here at the base of the trees but it's this gradient moving up uh and it's these trees in mist and it's just a beautiful photograph and a lot of his early work is you know you can see where how it developed into what he's doing today I love this one of the reads this is from 1977 so these were pretty early um this is around the time he came to the United States and started working for Ruth burnhard and by the way Ruth Bernhard wrote the intro to this book which is really kind of cool she says some really nice things about Kenna U but I think looking at these early images there's a lot of interest that you see um you know with implied leading lines for instance with composition where we have the rectangular image the sun kind of being on the point of the rule of thirds here but the point of Interest being this row of trees here it's not a bunch of trees it's one row of trees and to get that minimal with the composition and the way he shot it the angle he chose where you get a leading line that goes down in perspective with the top of the trees here and you know this kind of triangular form that shapes here and when you you can reduce the image to those those geometrical shapes a lot of times that's when you know a lot of the minimalist uh photographers certainly can included some of the time you know where where they start to to really come into play um you know the horizon line being in the middle of the frame here uh you know a lot of us are told early on in composition that's not what you want to do you don't want to do that and here Kenna is doing it to great effect but what makes it are these little points of interest on the horizon line this little group of trees the structure and then the other tree uh and then the the beautiful detail in these clouds and you can see that even early on Kenna had a real nice really solid eye for printing uh another one that I really love is this one and this is from 1974 um but the way the Mist works with the clouds and the trees below and you know these kinds of images the difficulty in shooting them is waiting for the right moment and there's no question that Kenna is one of those photographers who has a lot of patience um is is willing to wait for that moment um it was willing to put the time into it to do that he didn't just walk out and shoot that one day um that was probably uh plotted and waited on uh as far as Sunset goes and and all that stuff um another interesting one this is later this is from 1991 and you start to see Kenneth style mature quite a bit um I love this it's a landscape photo but what you have down here on the on the in the foreground it fades to black but you have sheep here on the foreground and then this flock of birds that's just kind of morphing its way through the composition and it's absolutely brilliant and again look at the printing look at the techniques that are included here um the way it goes to almost black down at the bottom the way that that landscape is really burned in and then the way that that you have this this luminance coming through the haze and the Sun and then the birds in the right place so you know I think with Kenna and what most people don't realize a lot of times is that the maturity of him as a photographer extends both in the printing and the the composition and what happens in camera and I think this is where you start to see a slight homage to anel Adams and a lot of the photographers that became before him and we're going to look at some of those images too where he pays a little bit of tribute at times which I think is wonderful um you know he's aware of where he is in that lineage and and where he is in terms of of modern photography another beautiful one just very simple landscape this this pyramid Hill in the back and a tree um to reduce it just to that especially when you're an exotic location I mean that takes a lot of patient and and skill to master and it's absolutely unbelievable um I'm going to bump up just a little bit here um and and this is another one now a while back I did a video that I called interpretations and what I did was I picked and I'd like to do another one of these in the coming episodes where I pick um a point of interest that multiple photographers have covered and how you immediately see the difference in their Styles and I think this embodies a lot of that uh which which is an image of stonehinge in England and how many photographers have shot stonehinge and it looks like Michael Kenna it does not look like somebody else did it you can tell it's Kenna style um and I think this is absolutely brilliant this is from 1990 again the printing technique the time of day it's shot the way that the the eye is drawn in using light and painting with light again some of this is done in camera some of this is done you know in the printing techniques in the dark room but you know I'd like to do another interpr R ation episode because I think this kind of image is what brings that down when you see um multiple photographers shooting the same thing but all retaining their own voice and I think that's where photography for me becomes very interesting and I think it's a great way to learn um and you could see this with a lot of uh these are I call them more recent this is 1990 also that this is uh Glastonberry tour um study number three in Somerset England and just it's just the essentials um you know we I talked a little while ago about the G stal in the German idea and graphic design of boiling it down to only the Essential Elements and this is what's really hard as a photographer I think is is not so much what you shoot it's what you're not shooting um and I think Kenna represents that so well um another omage here we're starting to see you know images of the Southwest U this is New Mexico USA obviously stiglets and uh you know his his lady George O'Keefe um really being identified with that part of the United States but here we have a compl completely different interpretation of this and it is pure Michael Kenna U this is from 1993 what's interesting though is this figure of the dog running past and that's something you don't see a lot in Kenna's imagery and I don't know if you're going to pick this up on the video or not it's over here in the way that's kind of highlighted with a little bit of dodging in the print I mean he's definitely in the shadows and so that was done post but uh very beautiful effect and and very meaningful uh composition technique uh I'm going to bump up a little more here and another one of my favorite images and this is where you start to see Kenna uh really develop a lot of his own personality here and I also think in some ways you know and I'm not trying to compare him to sagato at all but this is more of a sagato kind of approach here where you have this Frozen Fountain and this is in Detroit Michigan and it's a frozen Fountain so it's ice that's formed as the fountain stayed up all night or whatever it was and you know just this galumphing uh simplistic detail and the fact that it's just a geometric shape but when you get into it you see all these fine details of these plumes of water that formed into ice and uh really magnificent beautiful another thing I should mention too along these lines um another one that I really love uh from Detroit Michigan and just the simple cross that this makes um you know Kenna tends to work in large scale projects that he will take on and kind of commit himself to indefinitely and some of these include places like China they include plac places like the Easter Islands perhaps uh you know one of the big ones he did was the concentration camp locations of the images he donated to the state of France and he will just kind of like again that plays in with that Zen meditative quality to it where he will revisit a location and stay on it and and not give up and revisit it year after year after year and it's really interesting too because I think in Kenna's case you're going to see very minor differences uh but they are differences nonetheless and there's a whole body of work in here that we're get into that was done uh was starting to separate it out the Detroit stuffs later uh in Michigan showing that kind of deconstruction and if you're familiar with the United States you know that Detroit is a city that is in a lot of uh major state of disrepair in fact since we're talking about that let me bump ahead see if I can find those images um and and to really take that on with a level of respect it's at the end of the book here let's see if I can find it um that it deserves and and with that kind of kind of meditative uh exploration to it uh is is completely um amazing uh here we get into doc images here it comes so here's Dearborn Michigan so this is all um you know basically Midwest United States but this this element of Industry um the way you know again painting with light and the way that you see these these beautiful clouds and this moisture come into the image and you see the the state of Industry probably a little bit in a state of of of decline uh but a lot of the way these shapes work and not only that but you know and you see this probably I would say in Alvin langon Coburn's work which is much earlier than Kenna almost 100 years per se but but you know when you see these big dark high contrast shapes and the way that he uses light to add a dimension and a quality to this work so obviously the foreground is completely black and as it starts fading to the back these structures become lighter and lighter and so you get this real three-dimensional quality to the print um which is Simply Fabulous uh it's amazing these are all from deborn Michigan and I really love these images I think that this is one of his lesser known sets of work but uh I think it's extremely important it really paints this this this picture of the industrial nature of what's going on in this part of the United States and it's you know rapid decline I think as you see in recent years but anyway um back on track another famous set of his that he's known for are the shots redcliffe power station in the UK um and this was another study and again it's not just going out and shooting one image it's going out and revisiting and shooting a collection of images and experimenting with um possibilities so in some of these you see very long um possibly nighttime exposures where you have these clouds that tend to you know because the wind is blowing and they're moving uh they tend to become very smooth and and and and flow through the composition position like that whereas others as you'll see like this one on the right there shorter exposure and so that element of time and how that affects the picture um it's a shorter exposure and so you don't have the blur and and that that flow to the image and others you do and so it's it's just a really interesting character study of what's possible here um this one on the left I absolutely adore this is from 1984 and what's interesting is you know if you if you took this out of the context of the other images it may not have the same effect because you're only seeing a partial shape here uh and the way the smoke bill is out of that and I I think that that reducing it down and creating a curiosity maybe not including the whole image of what you're seeing sometimes is is just as important as something like this where you do see the whole image and Canon's just to master that these really long exposures where you know you start to see a really Lush smooth texture um almost organic in nature of what's what's going on with the images another one where you actually see the the Stars moving uh again long exposure via time with that and uh amazing stuff uh anyway another one of my favorites I think and you get that same effect here this is um other side of the world here this is Florida in uh from 1992 and you simply have an overturned chair or lawn chair on the beach and you know experimenting with the beach and again this would make good material for the interpretation section because the way that somebody like Michel Kenna approach is uh water and ocean and it's completely different than somebody let's say Hiroshi sugamoto who has a very different interpretation of what that that should be um another one of my favorites just these this the this little group of sticks here and how that communicates through the image with the textures with the clouds with the water um only enough information is given so that where we see that that's water we definitely have a horizon the water is different than the sky and then even these are mered so there's a sense of symmetry but also isolation of these elements and it's just what makes Michael Kenna so fabulous um another one that is very cool here to and I bookmarked this because um if you're a fan of hre K Bron this pays a little homage and actually it is entitled amage to HCB Britney France 1993 uh there's a famous image that hory c bran took um of the same row of trees with the road going through his composition was much different it was a rectangular format it extended out here um you rule of thirds and a lot of these painter composition techniques but again interpretations and so how has Kenna reinterpreted this image to be his own and that is the stamp of personality and that's what I think so few people understand about somebody like Michael Kenna that is what he is saying is that he is putting his own voice into it and doing it that way and I think that vote is severely missed a lot of times um I'm going to end it with this one this is one of my absolute favorite images um and what I love about this is there's almost a cartoonish uh illustrative type quality to this image this is another one from Paris this is called windy trees um the way the focus is played with here um the wind is obviously blowing that element of time comes in and he has chosen a a duration of shutter speed that gives you just enough motion to get a little bit of blur and a little bit inconsistency through here and a little bit of the surrealistic quality the second thing that makes this is the composition rectangular format and you only see this trunk you're not given another one and so it kind of looks like this weird tree is extended out into what is not actually possible in real life and I think this is just um the sense of play the sense of personality the sense of uh timing is what makes Michael Kenneth so absolutely amazing Michael Kenna is one of the more important figures in modern photography I think for a number of reasons but mainly because if you look at his approach to shooting Landscapes uh you have somebody that is very steeped in the tradition of somebody like ancela Adams and the photographers that have come before uh he still uses the dark room he still shoots film and I think there is a part of his work that definitely is an homage and it's a natural progression out of that lineage of the photographers that have come before what's interesting about Michael Kenna and it's very obvious in these photographs is that he is representing this new generation of landscape photography where there is rather than you know what anel Adams was doing and not to discredit anel at all but but anel's time he was trying to go for what he referred to to his straight photography which was getting away from pictorialism and just portraying Landscapes and and images in the way that they were naturally and be able to replicate that on the film that was the aesthetic that he was going for Michael KET is an extension to that and at the same time he also is a departure somewhat from that because what he is doing is he's looking for compositional breadth he's looking uh to make a statement with these images that you know it almost is more of this influence from the uh German bow house where of you know this idea of the Gestalt where you narrow an image down to only the essential components and what absolutely needs to be there and anything non-essential is excluded and and they're they're absolutely brilliant um there's a lot that he's saying I think intellectually emotionally with these photos and I just think the world of Michael Kenna um the only thing that saddens me about Michael Kenna and this is not Michael Kenna's fault at all but um you see a lot of people that clone his work now and you know he has such a striking interesting minimalistic style and I can understand why people enjoy that I love his work and why people want to get into that but I think there's a point where you can be influenced too far um I judged a competition last year that was online I won't say which one it was but um and there were some very good work in there but one thing that kind of saded me is like I mean I'm talking a lot like a good 75 80% of the images that were entered into this competition where I mean they look like it was Michael kenned Jr and they were brilliant photos they were intered they were beautifully rendered uh but the problem was is that they just looked like Michael Kenna and it was so blatantly obvious who the one photographer this individual was attaching themselves to and trying to emulate and you know I think it's interesting with any art and whether this be photography whether this be visual art like painting sculpture whether it be music anything like that I think it's okay early on when you're younger to try to emulate Your Heroes there's a lot you can learn from that you try to get into their mind see how they think things through um what makes them them but there does come a point in everybody's creative life where you need to enter the second act and by the second act I mean that's the point where you need to figure out what it is that makes you an individual and what you have to say uh to get across in the image uh Michael Kon did that and so did sebastio Sado and so did Tom Burell and so did Hiroshi sugamoto and a lot of the other photographers we' talked about on here um and I think at that point that is your responsibility is to find that voice and it's very very difficult to do I don't think I've ever successfully done it um you know a lot of photographers sometimes it takes a lifetime but also again look at Michael Kenna because I think this is one of the exciting and I think inspiring things about Kenna is that he had a long career of paying dues before he was ever known as a commercial or excuse me well he does commercial work but known as a fine artist and you know he assisted Ruth Bernard for over 10 years just working on PR and printing someone else's images and it was a long road for him and what I appreciate about that is the patience that goes into that which is very on par with what Kenna's kind of um personality tends to be um but he earned every bit of it and it's okay you don't want to do things too soon and and you definitely want to find your own voice and your own personality and I think Kenna has done that uh with something like landscape photography which has been very difficult I think in the shadow of anel Adams uh who did things a certain way for years and years um to break out of that mold and to try to find something new and a new voice to say about it and I think think certainly that kind of has so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I will see you guys in the next episode later

Channel: The Art of Photography

Views: 217,940

Keywords: Michael Kenna (Author), Michael Kenna, Photography, Photography (Visual Art Form), Photographer (Profession), Minimalism (Art Period/Movement), Minimal, Travel Photography

Id: EebLFDqAZuw

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 20 2015