Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
Michael Kenna : a twenty year retrospective
Image not available
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Rare Books
"How can a sustained thirty-year career be an aberration? This is a time of turbulence and edge, but should we dismiss someone who knows that and yet consciously chooses to make pictures that offer order, harmony, and respite? The energy that critics may wish to be in his work is expended in the doing, in the creation of over a dozen separate, coherent projects and thousands of single images. With the same discipline that he applies to long distance running, Kenna distills and refines. He is not turning off his critical faculties, but rather employs them to pay homage. The rebel in Kenna responds, 'I derive so much satisfaction from photography precisely because I've had the luxury of not caring what the art world thinks of my work. I have been able to use the medium as a way to help choose my personal journey or pilgrimage through this life. Most of the places I've photographed I chose because I wanted to acknowledge them and indeed pay homage to them...I haven't tried to be different or break any rules. I couldn't care less what the rules are anyway.'"--From introduction.
653194
Image not available
Rare Books
"Michael Kenna photographed Nazi concentration and extermination camps from 1988 to 2000, subsequently donating all negatives, prints and their respective rights to the French Government and the Caen Memorial. Kenna first visited the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France in 1986. Two years later he returned, still marked by the initial emotional impact, no doubt the key to his decision to develop a project about the Holocaust. Since then, he has repeatedly returned to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Lublin-Majdanek, Ravensbruck, Buchenwald and many other camps to photograph their restless emptiness. Overwhelmed by the abomination of the gas chambers and by the inexpressible suffering of the victims, Kenna wanted to share a memory that he found impossible to forget. Knowing that a work of art can be an invitation to meditation, he went to the concentration camps to photograph what they had become: sites of contemplation. The photographs in 'Impossible to Forget' are directly opposed to the evil that continues to live in the camps, to nihilism and to revisionism; they are bearers of peace and compassion"--Publisher's description.
653188
Image not available
Rare Books
"Michael Kenna's photographs from the Waldorf kindergarten are a homage to childhood and a paean to the imaginative potential of children's play. He came to know the kindergarten and Monique Grund first as a parent of his daughter, Olivia, and then as an artist who saw in the stuff of the place an emblematic presentation of the spirit of childhood. The images are the result of many sessions over several years in the kindergarten"--From introduction.
653099