Michael Kenna - Blog Response

Michael Kenna is a photographer from the UK. He focuses his work on black and white photography, usually landscapes with a lot nature pieces. His work is very simple to the eye, but has a lot of good photography technique that could be hard to be performed to an inexperienced photographer. A lot of his work requires long exposures, sometimes up to 10 hours. Kenna does really well at getting more than just dark black and bright white in his photos; he gets a lot of shades of gray in his photos. 

While I recognize that Kenna's work has a lot of technological talent, I find some of it a little boring. I saw that he does a lot of minimalism photography, which can be fun but after looking at a lot, I felt like I had seen enough. There are some minimalist ones I really liked. For example, Fourteen Trees Higashikawa  (pictured below) is more on the minimalistic side, but I do really like it. The dark trees with the light background is very nice to look at and I like that you can see faintly see the difference between the snowy ground and the white sky. 

Michael Kenna, Fourteen Trees Higashikawa, Hokkaido, 2009

I prefer photography with a little more to it. I really like photography that tells a story, or at least leaves room for me to find a story in the piece. After looking more, I found Swings (pictured below). I really like this one! This one has all the technique of getting the full grayscale, but has more of a full screen and shows a lot of elements. While the photo may not explicitly tell a story, it has opportunities for the viewer to interpret stories if so desired.

Michael Kenna, Swings, Catskill Mountains, New York, USA, 1977