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Matinee: 'Michael Kenna's Venice'
3 May 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 602nd in our series of Saturday matinees today: Michael Kenna - Venice.
This 7:41 video walks you through an April exhibit at Harris Harvey Gallery by British landscape photographer Michael Kenna.
"Kenna is both a diurnal and nocturnal photographer, fascinated by times of day when light is at its most pliant," the liner notes tell us. "Kenna's work is defined by extended exposure times, sometimes lasting several hours, unveiling hidden nuances of the Venetian landscape."
And his preference is to shoot at dawn or in the dark hours of night.
As we walk around the gallery, the video spotlights certain images for a moment. We found the technique distracting but you can pause the video on the stills to enjoy those images while rubbing your eyes as the video rolls through the gallery to the next image.
Kenna moved to San Francisco in 1977 to show and sell his work in galleries. At the same time, Ruth Bernhard, famous for her nudes, hired him as her printer and introduced him to the creative possibilites of printing negatives.
Kenna's photographs have been shown in nearly 500 one-person gallery and museum exhibitions and are included in over 100 permanent institutional collections including: The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Michael Kenna received the prestigious Officer des Arts et des Lettres medal in Paris in 2022.