20 Dec SOL LDN: 4th of July – 15th of July

Michael Kenna is one of the most acclaimed landscape photographers of his generation. His photographs have been the subject of some 50 monographs and are held in the collections of over 100 museums worldwide.
Kenna currently lives in Seattle. His photographs are held in permanent collections at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has been exhibited globally including solo exhibitions in the United States, India, Japan and South Korea. Kenna is also the recipient of numerous awards including the Imogen Cunningham Award in 1981 and in 2003 he was made an Honorary Master of Arts at the Brooks Institute, California.
“My first trip to Japan was in 1987 and I was hooked immediately. There are characteristics of the Japanese landscape that resemble and remind me of my homeland of England. Japan is a country of islands, surrounded by water. It is a place that has been lived in and worked on for centuries. It is geographically small and spaces are quite intimate in scale. I feel there is a powerful sense of atmosphere that resides in the Japanese soil, and as I like to photograph memories, traces and stories, I feel strangely at home wandering around this country. If one spends time in Japan, I think it is impossible not to be influenced and seduced by the Japanese sense of aesthetics, kanji characters, minimalism of artwork, and reverence of certain traditions.” – Michael Kenna