Michael Kenna

A Flickr post by i to I sent me off on a search for Michael Kenna’s photography–I find that if I look up the photographers who are favorites of people whose opinions I respect, I’m bound to find something good.

Well, I found more than good. I found something that changed the way I think about photography, and has inspired me to either put the cameras away or try really hard to learn to see with the sort of quiet intensity of Mr. Kenna.

When I first saw his pictures from Japan, I thought “haiku”: they’re spare, stark, simple, but not at all cold and devoid of feeling the way so much “minimalism” can be. They suggest much more than they show, and invite the viewer to a calm, thoughtful engagement with the image. These simple black and white photographs are not at all as simple as they seem; indeed, having spent hours trying to emulate this style, first in the field with my Lubitel and later in Photoshop, I can attest that there’s far more to them than meets the eye.

In reading the interviews posted on his site, I found that my initial impression wasn’t far from the mark. “If I use the analogy of writing,” Mr. Kenna says in LensWork, October 2003, “I feel that my work would be much closer to haiku poetry than full-length prose. I don’t need to describe everything that’s going on. I like to just suggest one or two elements and use those elements as catalysts for my own imagination, and hopefully for the viewers imagination.”

Getting these results requires a masterful control of the darkroom. Dodging, burning, cropping–Mr. Kenna does it all to achieve these results. And, refreshingly, he’s unapologetic about transforming the negative into a work of art: “The world doesn’t conform to the way that I see it,” he says in a 1997 PhotoWork interview, “so I change it in my prints. ”

I’ve got a long way to go before I can make the world conform to my vision. But looking at Michael Kenna’s photography makes me want to wrestle the world into shape, at least on film.