DON MCKENNA
DON MCKENNA
CREDITS
Following his photographic instincts to a natural conclusion, Don McKenna (b. 1952) has been impulsively shooting close to home in the Midwest since he graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute four decades ago.
Shooting the urban landscapes that surround him, McKenna shoots with a deft appreciation of form in an almost architectural manner. Using a large format camera to shoot his images, preferring the slower and more contemplative process, there is a crisp and colourful quality about his images that is not dissimilar to Wes Anderson’s cinematic approach in his clean and slightly asymmetric, almost utopian style.
Responding to visceral emotions evoked by the unintentional, visual poetry surrounding us in the “colours of our human-made and natural world”, the images McKenna produce are fantastically bright and playful yet slightly surreal because of his intentional exclusion of human presence, which is a fascinating insight into how bizarre and plastic our manmade world looks without man.
