Michael Kenna

This elegant collaboration pairs Michael Kenna’s luminous black-and-white landscapes with Pico Iyer’s contemplative prose, tracing the parallels of two lives lived in motion. Though they didn’t meet until they were both in their sixties, photographer Michael Kenna and writer Pico Iyer had been unknowingly following similar paths for decades. Both were born in England, studied near Oxford in the 1970s, moved to the U.S. West Coast, and fell in love with Japan. This book brings their work together in a profoundly personal collaboration: more than sixty of Kenna’s prints, each accompanied by an essay both from Iyer and Kenna himself. Kenna’s work—minimalist, often made in long exposure—captures fleeting moments of calm and clarity: a fog-bound canal in Venice, a deserted jetty in Mallorca, a line of trees dissolving into snow in Hokkaido. Spanning fifty years and five continents, these photographs offer meditations shaped by light, shadow, and quiet transformation. In prose that mirrors the restraint and depth of the images, Iyer writes about travel, childhood, coincidence, and the invisible threads that connect us. Beautifully printed and designed for slow reading and close looking, Same Sun Same Moon is a book for art lovers, writers, travelers, and anyone drawn to the subtle interplay of image and word, solitude and connection.

Constellation is born to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Michael Kenna’s artistic career. The publication comprises a curated selection of geographical subjects, a collection of photographic gems drawn from the artist’s extensive oeuvre, which has taken him across the globe over the course of his career. The artist’s current body of work encompasses approximately 3,700 photographs, captured in 43 countries, and Constellation exhibits 122 of these, spanning the years from 1973 to 2024.

A rocky coast along the Sea of Japan; an immense plain of rice fields in the snow; Mount Fuji towering over misty wooded hills; silent temples devoid of people but brimming with Buddhist deities; a Torii gate mysteriously emerging from moving clouds and water-these are a few images from this remarkable collection of photographs by Michael Kenna, whose black-and-white work is highly renowned. Forms of Japan, brilliantly designed by Yvonne Meyer-Lohr, is organized into chapters simply titled, "Sea," "Land," "Trees," "Spirit," and "Sky." The quietly evocative photographs, often paired with classic haiku poems of Basho, Buson, Issa and others, provide a contemplative portrait of a country better-known for its energy and industry. Gorgeously reproduced to convey the enormous subtleties that exist in Michael Kenna's traditional black-and-white silver prints, the photographs in this book include both well-known and previously unpublished images from all corners of Japan: Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Okinawa and Shikoku.

At age eleven, Michael Kenna developed his first roll of black and white film in a makeshift darkroom at St. Joseph's College, Upholland, the seminary he attended with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest. Kenna abandoned his religious calling after leaving the seminary, but his experiences there have continued to inform his work for decades. These gorgeous, meditative photographs were taken when Kenna returned to visit the now-shuttered school in the early 2000s. All of the qualities that make Kenna's work so appealing and evocative are here-richly nuanced tones, studies in contrast, his ability to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. But Kenna is also revisiting a way of life that may be disappearing-not only the, at times, ruthless discipline of the British boarding school, but also the somber beauty of religious practice. In page after page of richly toned images, Kenna's camera captures the architecture of the school's built environment as well as its spiritual architecture. Kenna's richly detailed biographical essay about his experiences and observations at St. Joseph's reveal much about the way Kenna thinks and works. A critical essay by Vincent Miles focuses on the 110-year history of the college, contextualizing Kenna's time there. At once captivating and haunting, this series is truly one of the photographer's most personal and powerful projects to date.