Michael Kenna valuation
Photographs still landscapes at dawn and by night, in long exposures, and prints every sheet himself.
Michael Kenna was born in Widnes, Lancashire, in 1953, studied at the Banbury School of Art and the London College of Printing, and moved to the United States in the late 1970s.
What a work by Michael Kenna is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Michael Kenna was born in Widnes, Lancashire, in 1953, studied at the Banbury School of Art and the London College of Printing, and moved to the United States in the late 1970s. In San Francisco in 1979 he took a job printing for the photographer Ruth Bernhard, and the discipline of the darkroom stayed with him. He photographs landscapes in black and white, often at dawn or at night, with exposures that can last for hours, so that water turns to mist and lights become trails: piers, single trees, snowfields and the coasts of Hokkaido, the gardens of André Le Nôtre in France, the cooling towers of Ratcliffe power station and the Ford Rouge plant in Michigan. He has photographed in Japan since the late 1980s and has published dozens of books.
He makes his prints himself, in his own darkroom, as small toned silver gelatin prints, many of them square, and issues them in editions. That makes the edition number, the size of the print and its condition the main questions, along with when it was printed, since an image may have been printed over many years. Because the prints are small and delicate, framing damage, mount stains and fading at the edges are easy to miss and matter more than they seem. Signed prints should be told apart from book plates, posters and other reproductions, which carry no signature or number and are a different market.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
