Forms of Japan by British photographer Michael Kenna brings together black-and-white studies of landscapes, spiritual sites, weather, and traces of human presence across Japan. Kenna first photographed in the country in 1987, after a Tokyo exhibition invitation led him to shrines and temples in Kyoto and Nara. From 2001, he undertook more extensive and repeated photographic journeys across Japan’s major islands, developing the body of work eventually assembled into the 2015 book of 240 photographs and related exhibitions.
The project examines absence, memory, transience, and the relationship between natural form and human meaning. Kenna rarely includes people, attending instead to temples, cemeteries, roads, barriers, and other sites where activity has receded but traces remain. His preference for suggestion over exhaustive description - he compares photographs to haiku - positions Japan not as a comprehensive documentary subject but as a field of partial encounters. Designer and writer Yvonne Meyer-Lohr later grouped the publication into Sea, Land, Trees, Spirit, and Sky, pairing images with classic haiku and framing them through isolation, strength, transformation, entireness, and elusiveness.
That suggestive approach appears in predominantly square compositions: isolated trees against snow, posts crossing water, mist-obscured Mount Fuji, fishing structures, torii gates, Buddhist statues, empty temples, and eroded rocks. Broad fields of white, gray, and black reduce depth and detail, while clouds, water, snow, and silhouetted structures create a quiet, suspended atmosphere. Serial Study titles and return visits to individual trees and lakes emphasize variations in season, weather, and time.
Kenna used manually operated cameras and black-and-white film, sometimes exposing for hours. His kit included Hasselblad 500CM bodies, 120 film backs, several lenses, filters, a light meter, and a tripod. He made his own silver-gelatin prints in a wet darkroom, generally on fiber paper and without digital editing.
The first exhibition opened at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco in September 2015, followed by presentations in Louisville, Mexico City, Seattle, Berlin, Lucerne, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Kenna received the 2016 Higashikawa Special Photographer Award for his Hokkaido sub-series.
