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EL PAISATGE DEL SENTIMENT
Michael Kenna
17.03.2023 - 06.05.2023
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Throughout the fifty years that Michael Kenna has dedicated to photography, he has never been concerned with fashions, tirelessly dedicated to the creation of images of landscapes, most of them placid, proposed by triangles of silver salts (about 20 by 20 cm) which are always positive by the same photographer.
Kenna does not sail against the tide, but follows his own logic, his own instinct, without worrying about trends or the dictates of the art market.
This fact has not prevented him – quite the contrary – from being internationally recognized, appreciated, exhibited, published, and collected. Although he presents himself as an “aberration”, his work is by no means misunderstood or undervalued.
Kenna has travelled the world, over the years and in all directions – stopping only, briefly, to return to his dark camera – not so much to discover it, but to photograph it, to incorporate one place or another into his particular universe.
He does not seek to describe it as documentary photographers can or have been able to do, but to capture and transcribe in images that which is in front of the place where he has decided to set his camera.
He does not show us what he has seen or what we could see in situ. When he prioritizes moments that are not very conducive to photography – dawn, twilight, the approaching night – and uses long exposures – from a few seconds to several hours – Michael Kenna ensures that the film records all kinds of phenomena that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Thus, clouds are stretched to infinity, the curve of the stars is inscribed in the sky, the surface of the water acquires a milky opacity…
His images are, therefore, more than landscapes, impressions: a feeling of landscape. While, at the same time, he invites us to share the landscape of his feelings.
In this sense, the vision is decidedly that of a romantic.
Kenna takes up this desire to transcend reality when he works in the laboratory: now he seeks to magnify his feeling by highlighting the smallest detail; now, on the contrary, he increases the effects of the mist so that only the essential appears or, even more, by tending towards the minimalism of a radical purification that maintains only the most extreme values, pure white and deep black.
The nature photographed by Kenna is rarely virgin. Rather, it is domesticated, always possessed by man. Although physically excluded from the image, the human being is omnipresent in the photographer’s corpus: from the sinuous design of fences in the snow of Hokkaido to “French-style” gardens; from Indian temples to Mayan pyramids; not forgetting, of course, the palaces, canals, and ports of Venice: the signs of his passage and his existence are innumerable. There is no doubt that man inhabits the world that is shown to us.
And it is precisely the absence of any human figure that allows the spectator to appropriate the landscape he contemplates, to possess it fully. This projection is further facilitated by the reduced format of the prints: nothing imposes itself on the viewer when everything summons him to a more intimate relationship.
Michael Kenna’s photographs cannot be seen in passing or in a hurry. To discover them requires effort and availability. It is only under these conditions that they reveal themselves, that their magic can work. That the encounter could not be more gratifying.
Alain D’Hooghe
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