Michael Kenna. Retrospective (fr-engl)

Michael KennaRetrospectiveUnder the direction of Anne BiroleauBilingual French-English - English translation by Isabel OllivierLibrary National of France, 200924 x 30 cm, bound under dust jacket, 232 pages156 three-color illustrations ISBN: 978-2-7177-2437-0 Diffusion-distribution: Seuil-Volumen49 ?Born in 1953 in Widnes, in the North West of England, Kenna is first and foremost a traveler. Far from fashion phenomena and dogmatism aesthetically, he built a body of work devoted to the landscape, photographed in black and white white, enclosed in the format of the miniature. The human presence is inscribed there in hollow, in a strange, ghostly way. The "black country" from the 19th century industrial, nuclear power plants with sculptural profiles stand side by side with the mysterious mists of the English countryside. Under his lens, the gardens 18th century French or Russian formalism reminds us that the landscape, fragment of nature, is above all a cultural construction. The shores, the ocean, the islands, inspire seascapes where the picturesque fades before Power: Kenna returns to Easter Island or Mont-Saint-Michel the enchantment and magical charge of the sacred places that they originally were. "The human presence is visible in Kenna's photographs only through his traces and its material achievements: architectural structures, buildings, bridges, statuary, artificial devices and arrangements of plants and meteors. [.] In Kenna, the habitation of the world is not reduced to the presence active of the builder man, to his movements in space, to his relationship with nature or the traces it leaves there. The habitation of the world involves man aesthetically. [.] In the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, a character seen from behind obscures the landscape he contemplates. We see no one in Kenna's photographs: it is the viewer who inhabits them" (Anne Biroleau). The retrospective in 210 photographs devoted to him by the National Library of France, presenting the work of this English photographer world famous, allows us to measure the evolution of his style, the freedom of his approach to landscape and the refinement of his prints. His recent works tend towards purity, and the landscapes of Japan substitute the graphic for the figurative. His latest works, devoted to China and Egypt, are exhibited for the first time. Reprint