John Kenny 123 challenge to translate the beauty and piercing intensity of such people into a photograph. I’d seen a lot of unremarkable portraits taken in traditional communities that demonstrated to me that strong subject matter alone doesn’t make for a compelling piece of art. The style of my photographs was a response to this problem and also reflects an aesthetic that I personally enjoy: black-and-white imagery that can express a degree of timelessness and drama. It is influenced by the use of light, dark, and dramatic contrasts that I had seen in the work of chiaroscuro (an Italian term which literally means light-dark) artists such as Rembrandt. FIG. 7: Muhacaona mother and child, Angola. August 2012. © John Kenny. I felt that to be successful in my aims, my portraits would need to abstract the “remarkable” (the people in my pictures) from the “not so remarkable” (the often dull, dusty, barren backgrounds of their arid communities). I also resolved to use the conditions and materials that I had available to me in remote African villages to create these portraits: This was sunlight (i.e., not artificial light) and a hut, usually borrowed from a villager, as my “studio.” So I started experimenting with these simple “ingredients” in a Kenyan Maasai manyatta (camp) in 2006 until I found the look that I was after. The blackness, or negative space, around the subject and absence of any distraction is meant to provide a feeling of real proximity to the subject when you look at the prints. For me this is one of the key ways to let the subject’s likeness—and the less tangible “aura” that I feel when meeting in person—to come across undiminished in the portrait. Also, shooting just inside a hut prevents any direct sunlight coming onto the person and so all light on the subject is reflected from the outside. It gives a beautifully soft illumination of the subject without using flash or reflectors. It has, however, taken a lot of practice: You need a lot of patience for this approach and a prayer for sunny days! TA: What’s coming up for all this? JK: The project is an ongoing one for me and I’m sure that I will be returning to Africa some time over the next six to twelve months. To where I’m not sure—I have wanted to go to the far north of Nigeria and Cameroon for a while, but security issues suggest that now might not be the right time for this trip. I had a six-week project in Angola and Ethiopia last summer, which will be the subject of a solo show in London with my gallery in spring 2013. When I started this project in 2006 I had a goal of publishing a book at some point. It’s taken a lot of work, but I’m happy to say that I’m working with Merrell Publishers in the UK to release a book of my work in the fall of 2013 called African Beauty.
I-IVCoverE_CoverF Vuvi
To see the actual publication please follow the link above