This is a repost of the Influencing Me Post on Michael Kenna. Time is short and I’m trying to get everything ready for my trip. Leaving Friday and not a lot of time to get things done. I hope you don’t mind that I will have to do some more of this just this week.
Looking at artists/photographers and how they work is an important move for anyone wanting to learn. You should study what they do, take away what you like and disregard what you don’t. We have looked at Michael Kenna before, but it was a while ago and that post no longer exists, so it seemed like a good time to be revisiting the work of Michael Kenna. Today we are going to be doing another Influencing Me post.
Influencing Me: Michael Kenna
Michael has been taking photos for a long time, here is a quick description of him from Wikipedia
Michael Kenna (born 1953) is an English photographer best known for his unusual black & white landscapes featuring ethereal light achieved by photographing at dawn or at night with exposures of up to 10 hours. His photos concentrate on the interaction between ephemeral atmospheric condition of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass.
That is really amazing those long exposures of up to 10 hours and makes me think I’m not pushing my photography enough.
Simplicity
One thing you notice when you start looking at his work is the simplicity of it. He does not fill his frame with objects or subjects and you can see that he has very little in his images. There is an isolation attached to them.
Monochrome
The use of monochrome is also interesting. Though it looks like they are not totally black and white, and he has applied some tone to them, though very little. Stripping the image of any colour makes you focus on the textures and patterns of what he had photographed.
There are scenes here that many of us have seen before from other photographers. However, Michael allows us to see them in a different way. Through his work you can see the world in a different way, and therefore challenges you to do the same. There are several images that would be good to try and do. Though not a copy, but in our own way.
Finally
I hope you have enjoyed the revisit of Michael Kenna’s work and would invite you to go and look at his website, Michael Kenna to see more from him.
Thanks for introducing me to Michael Kenna. I’m impressed with the simplicity yet very dramatic results. How do you do a 10 hour exposure?
You’re welcome, his work is all that. I don’t know how he does a 10 hour exposure. I would suspect that for most of us our cameras wouldn’t be able to cope with one that long. We would end up with too much noise in the images.
His work is intriguing and out standing, I have followed him for a while.
It certainly is Cornelia, I love it too.