Rouge: Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna (born 1953) has long been acclaimed as one of the most important landscape photographers of our time. Best known for his lyrical black and white images made under natural light conditions—often at dawn or dusk, or indeed long exposures made at night—and understood as heir to the Pictorialist tradition, Kenna’s work with industrial and post-industrial landscapes is among his most sustained investigations. His photographs of the Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan—once the most advanced factory in the world and an icon of U.S. industrial might—were made beginning in 1992, initially as an homage to the photographer Charles Sheeler.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.