A Quote by Michael Kenna

Most of my work involves slowing down rather than speeding up. I prefer to look at prints than scans, and I prefer to look at original silver prints rather than digital prints. I prefer to look at fewer images, but spend time with those individual images.
A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.
As a filmmaker, you complete a film you have spent years obsessively making, and you know the release prints will never look quite the same; prints get scratched and dirty.
Matte digital prints are gorgeous, don't you agree? But the glossy digital prints, I just can't stand that paper.
Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.
Should one be for or against pornography? I prefer to propose images of sexuality rather than to analyze the pros and the cons of pornography. Women are interested in erotics and sexuality, so I want to use my energy to propose images about that.
I definitely think men prefer women more undone and natural than butch and masculine. They prefer a fresher, sexier, more feminine look.
I never work with a screen. Other photographers have this black thing around, and they go back and look at it. I'd rather spend the time with the subject, photographing or discussing or talking, than staring at this thing. I'd rather look at what's going on.
I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down.
My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.
. . . the fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage . . . the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity.
A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.
I don't sit around wondering, 'Why am I here? Who made the stars?' I prefer to look at the stars and benefit from them rather than concern myself with how they got there.
I'm hugely inspired by the '60s and the '70s. I just love the music of that time and the overall freedom of that era. I love that the idea of clashing didn't really exist. You could mix prints on prints, you could mix fabrics and colors - and it was more about the way you felt than about the label and trends. That's something that I've always gravitated towards.
I tend not to look too much back; I tend to look forward. So, I suppose, I know, I've had probably most of my life, and there's less going forwards than there is going back, but I prefer to look in the future.
My affinity for beef extends into my home life, so you'll notice canvas prints of cows, a cowhide rug and prints of Smithfield meat market.
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