Michael Kenna – Immagini del settimo giorno 1974-2009

A tribute to one of the international masters of landscape photography. A selection of 290 black and white photographs retrace the creative iter of the English master, but American by adoption. Of these, 200 make up the actual anthological itinerary, 35 document the view of the Reggio Emilia area, 35 measure themselves against the perennial charm of Venice and 20 repropose one of Kenna’s historical cycles, the one on Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Reggio Emilia, the monograph starts from the images taken by Michael Kenna in his native England in the 1970s and 1980s, in which he dwells on urban and country landscapes, which already possess certain characteristics that will permeate his later way of photographing: an atmosphere of fog and smoke, captured in that indefinable moment of dusk or dawn. Kenna’s investigations of metropolises are retraced (New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio de Janeiro, or the bridges that in Paris, Prague and New York join the two banks of the rivers that cross them) to arrive at images of the remains of lost distant civilisations, or of creations that are closer to us in time (from the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids to the outline of the monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel, to the statues abandoned to themselves in the gardens of France) and the unforgettable cycle of ‘l’impossibile oblio’, realised in the 1990s on the sites of concentration camps and Nazi extermination camps: personal testimony, a memento of a man who knows how precious and necessary the transmission of memory is.