September 14, 2025Ever since Commodore Perry pressured Japan to open its ports to United States ships and thus foreign trade, in 1854, Western artists have been drawn to the country, its culture and particularly the masterful and enlightened art emanating from its creative class over centuries. “I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo a little more than 30 years later. “It is never dull and never seems to have been made in haste. Their work is as simple as breathing, and they draw a figure with a few well-chosen lines with the same ease, as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat.”
It’s not difficult to understand why the hallmarks of the Japanese painting and printmaking traditions cast their spell over artists first discovering their allure. The disciplined regard for nature and the primitive landscape are matched by the focused respect Japanese art affords the poetry of the quotidian. Subject, economy of means, simplicity of form and material execution all combine to enthrall the Western outsider.
British contemporary photographer Michael Kenna has, like many before him, been affected by these aesthetics. The latest evidence is the artist’s one-person exhibition “Michael Kenna: Japan / A Love Story,” curated by the gallerist Peter Fetterman and on view at New York’s International Center of Photography through October 12. The show, which originated in Tokyo and made stops in Los Angeles, London and Hong Kong before arriving in New York, is accompanied by a sumptuous book of the same title, edited by Fetterman and published by Nazraeli Press.
Kenna, no neophyte, has been traveling to Japan for nearly 40 years. On his first visit, for a solo show of his work in Tokyo in 1987, he was struck by the beauty of the country, its spiritual richness and the kindness and openness of its people. His affection for Japan grew ever stronger over the dozens of trips and thousands of photographs that followed. The results of his steadfast practice and immersion in place underscore his deep physical and spiritual affinity with the country’s artistic traditions, albeit manifested with the finesse of a skilled image maker working over half a century exclusively in the medium of black-and-white gelatin silver — anachronistically creating each print by hand in an analogue darkroom.
“This project has given me hope and restored my faith in the power and the beauty of traditional black-and-white photography,” says Fetterman. “With all the noise emitted from contemporary digital photography, Michael’s work is so needed now.”
The ICP installation is a nuanced and sensitive sequence of 100 small-scale works. To enter is to realize the prayerful attributes with which Kenna seeks to imbue this series of pictures and the sheer tactile beauty of the photographic paper itself.
Kenna has stated that “photography is about honoring and respecting the world around us,” and here the artist reinscribes this philosophy with a preponderance of minimalist views that venerate nature and the desolate rural landscape, often in forceful, graphic terms.
Mt. Takachiho, Lake Miike, Kyushu (2002) is representative of Kenna’s mastery of composition, in that, using the deepest inky blacks and subtly modulated grays, he employs photography to render the scene as a Japanese printmaker might. Foregrounding the silvery, shimmering lake, the view to the mountain is interrupted by the shoreline and the foothills that lead our gaze upward to the summit. Mountain Rains, Shiga, Honshu, Japan (2002) and Biwa Lake Tree, Study 5, Omi, Honshu, Japan (2007) similarly reinforce Kenna’s engagement with the pictorial traditions of the country while simultaneously transfiguring and refining them on the artist’s own aesthetic terms.
Trees figure prominently in Japanese art because of their sacred and symbolic significance, and the prevalence of tree images here displays Kenna’s respect for the harmony and balance they represent and their interconnectedness with the human spirit. Among the most arresting of his tree images are those that delimit their form through the stark contrast of positive and negative space, the most intense blacks set against a white ground, oftentimes in a snowy winter landscape, as in Two Leaning Trees, Study 3, Kussharo Lake, Hokkaido, Japan (2020).
In his highly influential 1899 book Composition, the artist Arthur Wesley Dow, an American expert on Japanese ukiyo-e (woodblock prints called “pictures of the floating world”), introduced the principle of notan. A neologism combining the Japanese words for “light” and “dark,” notan for Dow was the balance of the two within a composition, much like the contrasts in the yin-yang symbol. His approach shaped generations of artists by promoting a clear and structured way of thinking about visual design, a legacy to which Kenna is most certainly an heir. The exhibition’s Ice Flow, Cape Hinode, Hokkaido, Japan (2005) is perhaps Kenna’s purest expression of lightness and dark, as the artist pushes toward the outermost limits of photographic abstraction.
Many of Kenna’s most resolved images in the show take up the sacred subject of torii gates with remarkable equipoise and votive rigor. Greatly impacted by Shinto philosophy, Kenna is quoted in the exhibition program explaining that “torii gates in Japan symbolize the Shinto belief that deities reside not just in shrines, temples, churches, mosques, synagogues . . . but in nature, in the earth, sky and water.” Torii, Study I, Takashima, Honshu, Japan (2002), for example, and Temple Rooftops, Kyoto, Honshu, Japan (1987) point to Kenna’s desire to record his decades-long experiences in Japan but never in the orthodox mode of committed documentary photography.
“Michael has taught me so much,” says Fetterman in his curator’s note, “his passion, his humility and the way he shares his vision so generously. His images invite us to see the world differently, to slow down, to feel.” Much like haiku poetry, traditionally bound to representations of the natural world, this exhibition epitomizes how the artist has long sought to evoke feelings, memories and images with his work rather than simply use his camera to describe them.
