The Po as a symbol of flowing time: the great river in Michael Kenna's photos

The Po as seen through the eyes of Michael Kenna (Widness, England, 1953): this is the project behind the exhibition Fiume Po, a solo show by the British photographer staged from Oct. 16 to Nov. 8, 2020, at the Reggia di Colorno as part of the new edition of the ColornoPhotoLife festival, whose theme this year is Time, Around Us. Kenna’s photographs, exhibited to the public for the first time, follow one another in the Petitot Room, Minerva Room, Alcove, Farnese Triumph Room and Mars and Venus Room.

There are 52 images in the exhibition, flowing before visitors exactly as the Po flows from its source to the Adriatic, as it gradually takes shape and is laden with evidence of the life that takes place on and around the edges of the waterway. The photographer’s aim, in the course of his investigation that began in 2007, is not to document what has otherwise been repeatedly fixed but to penetrate and capture realities and fragments that aim to imprint themselves in space and time as a kind of figurative synecdoche of the eternal flowing. “This is thanks to the choice of the use of black-and-white analog film and the patient work in the darkroom,” explains curator Sandro Parmiggiani, “in the constant tension to a peculiar style that is embodied in the formal perfection of the framing, in the ability to capture lights and atmospheres that become a song to harmony and express a sort of mystical sense, with the light halos that enhance a detail within the image.”

As one of the most important contemporary landscape photographers internationally, Michael Kenna thus accompanies visitors among trees, floodplains, farm houses and crops, industrial plants and bridges, on a physical journey that inevitably seeps into the interiority. On the occasion of the exhibition, a volume, Il Fiume Po, published by Corsiero, is also being published with the reproduction of 102 images chosen from the hundreds taken by the photographer and a bilingual (Italian and English) introductory essay by curator Sandro Parmiggiani, Conversazioni sul Po, which dwells on Kenna’s style and traces, albeit summarily, the rich imagery aroused by the Great River and which has been deposited in memory through photography, cinema, and television.

“Kenna,” Parmiggiani writes, “brought with him, along the journey along the banks of the Po, a kind of mirror that allowed him to capture beauty (dare we pronounce this word) in the majestic elements and in the humbler ones. The magma of memories, of accumulated images, short-circuited what was in front of him, and then his style manifested itself in the language and syntax of his photographs, tending to order and crystallize a vision that is, at once, of the real and of interiority.”

Image: Michael Kenna, Dramatic clouds (Sannazaro de’ Burgondi, Pavia, 2019)

In addition to Michael Kenna’s exhibition, Franco Fontana’s Route 66, Livio Senigalliesi’s Collateral Effects, and the solo shows of Raffaele Petralla and Camilla Biella, as well as the group shows Dell’esterno, dall’interno, works from the CSAC/University of Parma Photography Workshop during the Lockdown and Maria Luigia oltre la posa: una sovrana raccontata per gusto e per diletto research by Color’s Light members, find space in the Colorno exhibition this year. Fiume Po is open on the main floor of the Reggia di Colorno from Oct. 16 to Nov. 8, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 to 6 p.m.

The Po as a symbol of flowing time: the great river in Michael Kenna's photos

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