Michael Kenna: What can we learn?

 

 

Michael Kenna’s work shows how a photographer can turn the simplest of landscapes into portals of feeling and thought. Kenna is known for his black and white images which showcase things such as shrouded piers and lone trees in snow. Kenna can strip each scene of its essentials; by choosing long exposures and minimalist compositions he is able to transform these ordinary places into places that now feel timeless and mysterious.

While many landscape photographers are chasing the grand, we see Kenna seek the quiet, and hushed beauty of the world instead. Instead of making some grand statement like a towering waterfall, or the blazing sunset he does a single branch against a steel-gray sky, or a boat’s silhouette hovering on a sea, these become his statements instead. His pictures don’t have us asking “what are we seeing?”, but they rather have us ask “What are we feeling?” The absence of clutter in his images become the image, they become a presence of silence, of breather, of space, and of awareness.

For me, Kenna’s photographs show that rare stillness we notice only when everything else stops. After a long day of deadlines, and non-stop work and medical stress, I picture one of his snow blanketed trees or his fog softened docks, and I can practice feeling the world slow down around me. His work reminds me of those nights when I was outside listening to the wind in the branches, or the quiet and whistle of the wind after a snowfall. In this quiet, I can find the room to reflect, and in Kenna’s images I am able to find this same room.

Going forward, I want to take a lesson from Michael Kenna, I want to first look for emptiness as a shape in a photograph, almost like negative space. I can take some inspiration from Kenna such as the low light of dawn that turns rooftops into silhouettes, or maybe the drift of the fog over a still pond. I want to start looking at not recording the scene but rather to capture the feeling of calm awareness.