Michael Kenna caught my attention and impressed me by his set of black and white photos of New York. I picked this unique photo “Wall painting, New York, New York, USA, 2013” under this link=http://www.michaelkenna.net/gallery.php?id=14 (picture #3). My first interpretation of this photo was wrong because I thought that represents shadows of people in a concert or a party especially with that diagonal lighting form across the photo; but actually when I read the title I discovered that the picture is a wall painting of New York. The wall, the window and the door are painted in a continuous way as they form one piece where the shadows, the watermark give the photo readers a “trompe l’oeil”. I checked the rest of Kenna’s artwork, but I really felt in touch with this photo because it gives me a sense of how black and white pictures sometimes could give you a false vision of what they really are like it happened to me. I like this picture because it remembers me of previous participations in painting school walls and I enjoyed it. I think Michael Kenna likes shooting monuments of New York in black and white style which gives his works a unique style among other photographs. I believe Michael Kenna’s photographs dominate the architectural mood and he likes taking picture of monuments.
There is a very high contrast between the background and the foreground in this photo; the foreground consists of black shadows in the half bottom of the picture and the background consists of mostly grey lightening color with a diagonal white form that divides it in two slices which drives our eyes along and gives you a sense of movement. Placing the shadows in the bottom gives the photo a strong base and certainty feeling. The interference of the different shapes _diagonal, rectangles (window and door), triangle…etc._ in this photo helps create and develop the architectural mood of Kenna’s photos. Everything in this image has some sort of shape and pattern. The balance is pretty much obvious between light and dark where the line is strongly present as well.
Interesting choice. You picked a very atypical photo for Michael Kenna. I too had to look closely at it to figure out it was a photo of a mural. As you state the contrast of light and dark is key in making the photo interesting. Here it is the colors of the painting that provide that contrast as opposed to the light. Often when we talk about the contrast of light and dark we mean that one part has bright light and another has no light.