PHOTO: Michael Kenna-Bridges of Michael Kenna
Michael Kenna is best known for his black-and-white landscape photography in which he often utilizes drawn-out exposure times, some up to 10 hours in length. Most of Michael Kenna’s photography is taken at dawn or at night, and he has commented that you can’t always see what’s otherwise noticeable during the day … with long exposures you can photograph what the human eye is incapable of seeing.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Robert Mann Gallery
Michael Kenna speaks of Bill Brandt as a guiding constellation in his creative night sky. After Brandt’s passing in 1983, Kenna set out to honor that influence, traveling to the very landscapes Brandt once framed, breathing new light into the places where another master’s shadow lingers. Equally powerful is Kenna’s devotion to Japan, a country he has wandered for decades, almost from shore to shore. From these pilgrimages emerged Japan, a book of photographs that read less like prose than like haiku—each image a distilled breath, a pause where silence becomes eloquent. Bridges have become his quiet obsession. They are both metaphor and miracle: steel and stone suspended between what once was separate. They carry us over rivers and ravines, binding the once-distant, drawing a single line through open air. Most of us cross them absentmindedly, but Kenna stops time. Through his camera’s patient gaze, a bridge becomes a poem of geometry and grace, an echo of human ingenuity set against the endless movement of the natural world. To usher in the fall of 2025, Robert Mann Gallery unveils “The Bridges of Michael Kenna,” a collection that sings of passage and connection. Kenna’s first exhibition with the gallery opened in 1997, the same year a certain film—The Bridges of Madison County—told its own tender story of a photographer chasing historic crossings. Kenna shares that fascination. “Bridge structures are usually geometric and stationary, with straight lines, verticals, horizontals, and other angular constructs,” he reflects. “The universe is constantly moving—flowing, organic, uncontrollable, unpredictable. The abstract relationship between the two, almost like yin and yang, can be visually stunning and continues to fascinate and attract me.” Within these frames, bridges stretch across oceans and centuries. The soaring “Sydney Harbour Bridge, Study 1, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia,” and the iconic “Brooklyn Bridge, Study 1, New York City, USA,” hum with the pulse of cities and countless crossings. Smaller passages whisper their own stories: the quiet “Canal Bridge, Banbury, Oxfordshire, England,” the hushed elegance of “Ponte dei Sospiri, Venice, Italy.” Some bear trains and tides of traffic; others cradle only the solitary traveler. Each is photographed in the hour between night and day, when light softens and the world seems to inhale, holding still long enough for memory to take root. Here, what was once the end of the road becomes a threshold. Isolation dissolves into communion. Landscape and architecture, silence and motion, stone and sky—they meet in Kenna’s vision and linger as a single, resonant chord. Spanning more than half a century of patient looking, “The Bridges of Michael Kenna “invites us to step onto the span itself, to feel the quiet tremor of connection beneath our feet, and to see the world as a place forever ready to be crossed.
Photo: Michael Kenna, Pont des Arts, Study 3, Paris, France, 1987, Toned silver print, 7.875 x 7.75 inches, Edition of 45, © Michael Kenna, Courtesy the artist and Robert Mann Gallery
Info: Robert Mann Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9F, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/9-18/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-14:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.robertmann.com/
