Torii, Study 1, Takashima, Honshu, Japan. 2002
Mountain Tree, Study 1, Danyang, Chungcheongbukdo, South Korea.
The marriage of Michael Kenna, the master of black & white landscape photography, and Guimet, the French Asian art museum, was written in the stars. Kenna’s photography has been deeply inspired by Japanese aesthetics, whether filming Versailles’s garden in winter, Japan’s landscapes or The Rouge steel plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Even though the English born artist has been living in the USA for decades, he has retained a strong connection to France. This exhibition, Haikus d’Argent (“Silver Haikus”) coincides with the donation of his entire archives to the Guimet museum: 4,000 original prints, 180,000 negatives and contact sheets, and all his archives over 50 years of work. This monumental gift will be added to the Guimet’s already substantial photography collection - over 600,000 photographs made in Asia since the invention of photography collected by the museum since its foundation by Emile Guimet in 1879.
Taungthaman Lake, Study 2, Amarapura, Myanmar.
“The use of black & white, the economy of means, the emptiness (...), easily echo ink painting,” analyzes the museum. “The numerous steps in analog photography, the patience it requires and the aloneness it implies evoke the ethics of artisanal work so present in East Asia.” The emotions Michael Kenna’s images can trigger in the viewer are connected to the very Japanese art form of the haikus.
In the photographer’s work, humans are absent, but their presence is felt through traces - boats on a lake, a fence to hold the snow, wooden planks on a lake, even construction sites. There is a deep quietude emanating from these pictures, of harmony with nature, but also a vague sense of unease: has life disappeared ? But Michael Kenna’s lens captures mostly nature - mountains, oceans, lotus flowers, solitary trees, etc. He also has developed a connection to certain trees that he considers as old friends. Each image is a meditation. The eye can guide the mind to the inner self.
Michael Kenna’s images have a deep resonance with the works throughout the musée Guimet. They evoke motifs on an ancient ceramic vase or calligraphy. For instance, the image of a seaweed farm with its delicately waving fences is similar to Teshima Tairiku’s calligraphy of the character “Kan” (“return”).
Michael Kenna has also a beautiful exhibition on Japan at Camera Obscura, his Paris gallery, in Montparnasse, to complement the Guimet exhibition to prolong the delicate meditation and to quiet the mind, and also to discover new works like his studies of nudes looking like a Japanese landscape.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Haikus d’argent. L’Asie photographiée par Michael Kenna. Guimet. guimet.fr. Until September 29.
Also: Japon, L’Empire des Signes. Camera obscura. galeriecameraobscura.fr Until July 31.
Crumbling Boardwalk, Shiga, Honshu, Japan.
