Photography Conf / signature Trees in the Arts and Literature. Around Michael Kenna’s Photography

The Lycée Champollion, in collaboration with Grenoble Alpes University and the Maison de l’Image in Grenoble, continues its series of international study days on various themes and techniques related to the photography of Michael Kenna (1953-…), a British photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world.

This second study day aims to highlight another major source of inspiration for his work: the representation of trees. Since the late 1970s, Kenna has been photographing trees assiduously: a first exhibition in 2011, organised by the KONG gallery that presents his work in Seoul, showed a selection of his photographs of trees, accompanied by the publication of a catalogue entitled Philosopher’s Tree. The choice of the title to present his photographic practice on trees is characteristic of Kenna’s approach. This name becomes the symbol of an entire body of work: trees allow the photographer to encounter nature in a way that is physical, sensitive, intellectual, aesthetic, but also metaphysical.

Kenna explores the structuring power of trees in the landscape. The frequent wintry nature of his settings reveals the exceptional beauty of his subjects, the balance of their forms, and the harmonious, geometric development of their branches and trunks. Thanks to very long exposure times, which can last up to ten hours, his images reveal elements that the human eye usually ignores or cannot perceive. To quote Chantal Colleu-Dumond, who wrote the preface to Arbres in 2022, “as if through a synaesthetic effect, his images of trees are filled with a particular mystery and absolute silence that give them a sense of obviousness and universality” (2022, 4).

Chantal Colleu-Dumond goes even further, making our experience with Kenna’s tree photography a revelation of our relationship with time: “The time of trees is not that of humans; Michael Kenna emphasises their permanence as much as our finitude” (2022, 4). But Kenna’s practice also brings us back to the notion of temporality, duration, and series. Kenna loves to photograph oak trees: he fell in love with a large oak tree in the town of Beaverton, near Portland, Oregon. In June 2021, Kenna began a series of portraits of the Beaverton oak. A year later, he had already assembled a selection of 83 photographs, taking advantage of the lockdown, which allowed him to stage this tree in a space emptied of its inhabitants. Kenna’s photographs of this oak tree take us back to the early days of photography, with William Henry Fox Talbot’s mid-19th century shots of oak trees, which made trees the ideal subjects at a time when photography required long exposure times that caused blurring for any non-static elements.

We invite you to see these majestic beings in a new light, to listen to the lessons of these non-humans at a time marked by a necessary return to “The Land,” the title of Bill Brandt’s exhibition that revealed Michael Kenna’s vocation as a landscape photographer in 1976.

The main themes covered:

1) Trees in the work of Michael Kenna
2) Trees in art history: possible links with 18th-century painters and 19th-century photographers
3) Trees on screen
4) Trees in literary creation
5) Trees as subjects of law, agency, or discourse
6) Trees as abstraction and natural minimalist architecture
7) Trees as political and ecological symbols
8) Trees as vertical axes/spiritual bridges between the visible and the invisible
9) Trees and their relationship to time: the concept of long exposure, series, and repetition
10) Trees and memory: local or universal symbols?

Papers may be published.
Proposals should consist of a single file headed by the name of the lecturer; they should include a short biography (maximum one page) and the paper proposal (maximum 3,000 characters including spaces). They may be written in French or English.

Deadline for submission to [email protected] : May, 1st 2026.

Date and venue: Friday, November 27 2026 at Lycée Champollion, Grenoble (France)
Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2026