Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna’s prints have a distinguished provenance. Since the start of his career in the 1970s Michael Kenna has worked solely with film, and he makes every silver gelatin print himself personally, in his darkroom at his home studio in Seattle, USA.

Michael Kenna has travelled the world to create his distinct black and white images of unpopulated landscapes. It was in the mid-1980s that Kenna first began to visit Japan and became influenced by an Asian sense of aesthetics. In 2002 he started his love affair with the northern island of Hokkaido where his compositions became increasingly minimalistic and abstract, free from extraneous sensory information. In the following interview extract we hear the story behind his iconic photograph Tree Portrait, Study 1, Wakoto, Hokkaido, Japan 2002 which appeared as the cover of his Retrospective Two book, published by Nazraeli Press in 2004.