michael kenna, kostuik gallery, jennifer kostuik, yaletown, photography exhibition, vancouver, bc, canada, west coast fine art

From Seminary to Silver Gelatin: The Fifty-Year Career of Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna was on course to become a priest. Raised in a working-class Irish-Catholic family in Lancashire, England, he attended a Catholic seminary school until 1972, when a childhood love of art pulled him in another direction. He has since spent fifty years working at dawn and through the night, leaving his shutter open for hours while clouds drift, water moves, and the light slowly arrives.

That patient work has left a record the French State now houses in full: his entire archive. It sits alongside almost five hundred solo exhibitions, 47 books of photography, a place in well over a hundred permanent collections, and a parallel career as an in-demand commercial photographer. As Kostuik Gallery prepares to present Beautiful Fukushima, here is the career that arrives with the work.

Sairyuji Jizo in Snow, Mishima Fukushima, Japan. 2026 | Michael Kenna, Photographer

From Seminary to the West Coast

Kenna was born in 1953 in Widnes, an industrial town in Lancashire, and traces his lifelong attention to trees to a park across the road from his childhood home. After the seminary he studied at Banbury School of Art, then at the London College of Printing, graduating in 1976. He moved to San Francisco in 1977 to work as a commercial photographer and has lived on the American West Coast since, today in Seattle.

A Commercial Career Alongside the Fine Art

His clients span automotive, finance, technology, and wine, including Audi, BMW, Rolls-Royce, HSBC, Toshiba, and Château Lafite Rothschild. Brands like these buy atmosphere and restraint, and Kenna’s command of light, long exposure, and meticulous printing delivers both, backed by decades of precision.

Slow Exposures and Deliberate Uncertainty

Most of Kenna’s photographs are made at dawn or at night, and his subject is the interaction between the natural landscape and human-made structures. Long exposures, sometimes lasting through the night, allow time and movement to enter the image. “You can’t always see what’s otherwise noticeable during the day,” he has said. “With long exposures you can photograph what the human eye is incapable of seeing.”

He leaves cameras working for hours without knowing what will pass through the frame. He resists pre-visualizing a finished print, a principle long associated with other fine art photographers, such as Ansel Adams. Rather, Kenna accepts that many exposures will fail. Since about 1986 he has worked mainly with Hasselblad medium-format and Holga cameras, which account for the square format of most of his images.

A Craft Kept Alive in the Darkroom

Kenna works in sepia-toned silver gelatin, a traditional, non-digital medium. A gelatin silver print is built from four layers: a paper base, baryta, a gelatin binder, and a protective gelatin overcoat, and the sensitivity of the silver salts demands specialized equipment and fastidious technique. Kenna makes his prints himself, in his own darkroom.

“Black and white darkroom printing has been around since the 18th century, but is now in danger of becoming something of a lost art,” Kenna has said. “Having spent 45 years happily printing in my own darkrooms, I state this from personal experience.”

A Body of Work Built on Returning

When a French estate invited him to exhibit his tree photographs, a review of his archive turned up more than 600 tree images among roughly 3,500 in his body of work. He still returns to favourite trees around the world, including one in Hokkaido, Japan, that he first photographed when it stood two feet tall.

His subjects extend to Venice, Italy, which he has photographed since the 1970s, to statuary, and to the sites of Nazi concentration and deportation camps across Europe, work that appeared in the opening credits of the 2010 film Esther’s Diary. Eugène Atget, Bill Brandt, Mario Giacomelli, and Josef Sudek were early influences, and Kenna describes photography as a collaboration between the photographer and what is in front of the lens.

A Life’s Archive in the Collection of the French State

France named Kenna a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in 2000. In 2022, Rima Abdul Malak, France’s Minister of Culture, awarded him the rank of Officier des Arts et des Lettres at Paris Photo. His life archive is now housed by the French State at the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie at Fort Saint-Cyr in Montigny-le-Bretonneux.

The donation includes 3,683 original silver gelatin prints made in 43 countries, 175,000 additional negatives, 6,422 working prints, 1,280 Polaroids, and fifty years of artistic archives. His work is also held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

The Work Arriving in Vancouver

Beautiful Fukushima brings 50 sepia-toned silver gelatin photographs to Kostuik Gallery, marking fifteen years since the natural disasters of 2011 and reflecting on the region’s resilience. His work first appeared at the gallery in a 2019 group exhibition, and this marks his return with a dedicated solo presentation.

The exhibition runs October 15 through November 1 at Kostuik Gallery, 1070 Homer Street, with an opening reception on Thursday, October 15, from 5 to 7pm, with Michael Kenna in attendance. The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday from 10am to 6pm, Saturday from 10am to 5pm, and Sunday from 12pm to 4pm, and shares exhibition updates on Instagram.

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Luxury Lifestyle Observer: Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury and luxury lifestyle niches. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read business magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and is an EIC for Hire. Connect with her here: [email protected].