Michael Kenna: Silver Haikus

The influence of Asia’s arts and culture on Michael Kenna’s black-and-white landscapes, evoking everything from Zen gardening to Chinese calligraphy

Since his first visit to Japan in 1987, British photographer Michael Kenna (born 1953) has returned time and again to capture Asia’s landscapes. The poetic power of Kenna’s photographs and their ability to extract emotion from the landscape--from the dignity of a tree or a rock--has led some commentators to describe them as visual haikus.
Silver Haikus provides a thematic retrospective of his work in Asia over the last 40 years. It explores the connection between his aesthetic and Asian art through formal dialogues between his photographs and works from the Chinese, Korean and Japanese collections of the Musée Guimet. More specifically, this book observes the influence of Asian arts in Kenna’s work: the choice of monochrome, the economy of means, the use of emptiness and the desire to suggest rather than describe evoke the ink paintings of Chinese scholars and Japanese Zen monks.