MICHAEL KENNA – CONFESSIONALS/ABRUZZO
2017-07-03‘Confessionals’ is a departure from the landscape work for which Kenna has become known and is the culmination of over 10-years work, travelling through Reggio Emilia, a city in northern Italy, to document hundreds of Catholic confessional booths. These will be shown alongside new photographs of the Abruzzo landscape from his new book, published by Nazraeli Press.
‘Confessionals’ is a typology of confessional booths from a distinct geographical region, documenting booths from the 13th century to the present. Shot in black and white, each booth is uniformly the focal point of each image, framed by the details of the church interior which happen to be in shot albeit a crucifix, pillar or ladder offering small clues as to the church’s architecture and context in which the booth is placed.
Kenna’s careful composition of the booths symbolises what he continues to search for in his photography, ‘the invisible with the visible, the intangible contained with the tangible, the illusion of reality’. Kenna is not interested in documenting man’s physical presence, but rather the traces that he has left behind and he believes Confessionals to be containers of memories and hidden secrets . Each photograph displays immaculate detail and continues ongoing fascination with capturing memories and stories, viewing the booths as containers of memory and hidden secrets.
Opposite – Confessional, Study 68, Chiesa Di San Filippo Neri, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2016
Exhibition runs through to July 15th, 2017
Beetles+Huxley
3-5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE
