Michael Kenna has been making images for 50 years. In that point he has stood at the hours of darkness, typically alone, typically within the chilly, typically for hours… ready. Not for one thing to occur, however for every thing to cease taking place.
His digicam sits on a tripod. The shutter stays open. The world blurs and dissolves. And what stays, stripped of its noise and litter, is one thing nearer to feeling than truth. This isn’t how most of us shoot. And that, largely, is why most of us do not shoot like Kenna.
His new e-book, Same Sun Same Moon, revealed by Prestel this April, is ostensibly a collaboration with author Pico Iyer. And it’s, genuinely, a lovely one. But for me, it features as one thing else: a transparent, sustained argument for restraint. For vacancy. For the act of taking much less out of a body, no more.
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The lengthy sport
Kenna’s approach is deceptively easy. He shoots on medium format movie, makes use of lengthy exposures (generally minutes, generally longer), and works nearly solely in black and white. The lengthy publicity is the important thing. It smooths water into silk, dissolves clouds into pale washes, erases the vacationers from the piazza. What you are left with is little greater than structure, gentle and time.
The 60-odd duotone images in this book span five decades and five continents. A fogbound canal in Venice, free of gondoliers and selfie sticks, becomes ancient and melancholy. A deserted jetty in Mallorca floats in silver. A line of trees in Hokkaido dissolves into white. These aren’t places you’d recognise from a travel brochure, even if you’ve been there. They’re places as they exist when no one is looking. Or, perhaps, when someone is looking for a very long time.
For digital shooters trained to fire ten frames a second, this method demands the opposite. Arrive early, set up slowly, wait longer than feels comfortable. Then, shoot fewer frames than feels safe. The discipline is its own education.
What photographers can learn
Overall, this book is an object lesson in black-and-white composition. Kenna builds his images around the same principles photographers have used for over for a century: tonal range, negative space, the tension between subject and ground. But he applies them with unusual rigour.
There are no happy accidents here. Every element earns its place. The horizon sits exactly where it should. The single tree, the lone figure, the isolated boat: each is placed with the precision of a haiku.
For photographers looking more to develop their eye than upgrade their gear, this is a book to study. Not in order to copy (Kenna’s aesthetic is too distinct to borrow wholesale), but to understand why a frame can work with almost nothing in it, and why that requires more skill, not less.
Same Sun Same Moon is designed, as the publishers put it, for slow reading and close observation. It sounds like a sales pitch. It’s actually an instruction.
Same Sun Same Moon by Michael Kenna and Pico Iyer is revealed by Prestel, $45/£35.