Michael Kenna – My life in Photography

29th November 2023

My life in Photography: Photographer Michael Kenna in discussion with Gallerist Peter Fetterman, on the launch of his new book Photographs & Stories.

Credit: Michael Kenna, Photograph by Mateo Colla

Michael Kenna’s mysterious photographs, often made at dawn or in the dark hours of night, concentrate primarily on the interaction between the natural landscape and human-made structures. Kenna is both a diurnal and nocturnal photographer, fascinated by times of day when light is at its most pliant. With long time- exposures, which might last throughout the night, his photographs often record details that the human eye is not able to perceive.

Kenna is particularly well-known for the intimate scale of his photography and his meticulous personal printing style. He works in the traditional, non-digital, silver photographic medium. His exquisitely hand crafted black and white prints, which he makes in his own darkroom, reflect a sense of refinement, respect for history, and thorough originality.

During Kenna’s fifty year career, his photographs have been shown in almost a thousand one-person gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the world, and are included in over a hundred permanent institutional collections, including; The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Ninety monographs and exhibition catalogs have been so far published on Kenna’s work, including; Michael Kenna – A Twenty Year Retrospective (Treville, 1994 and Nazraeli Press, 2000); Impossible to Forget (Marval and Nazraeli Press, 2001); Japan (Nazraeli Press and Treville Editions, 2003); Michael Kenna – A Retrospective (BnF, 2009); Immagini del Settimo Giorno (Skira, 2010); China (Posts and Telecom Press, 2014); France (Nazraeli Press, 2014); Forms of Japan (Prestel, 2015); Rafu (Nazraeli Press and Shuppan Kyodosha, 2018); Beyond Architecture – Michael Kenna (Prestel, 2019) and Michael Kenna – Photographs and Stories (Nazraeli Press, 2023).

 

Credit: Peter Fetterman, Photograph by David Montgomery

Born in London, Peter Fetterman has been deeply involved in the medium of photography for over 40 years. Initially a filmmaker and collector, he set up his first gallery 35 years ago in 1988. He was one of the pioneer tenants of Bergamot Station, the Santa Monica Center of the Arts, when it first opened in 1994. Peter Fetterman Gallery has grown to hold one of the largest inventories of classic 20th Century photography in the country particularly in humanist photography. Diverse holdings include work by Michael Kenna, Henri Cartier- Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Steve McCurry, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, Willy Ronis, André Kertesz, Lillian Bassman, Pentti Sammallahti, Sarah Moon and Jeffrey Conley.