Michael Kenna was born in Widnes, northern England, in 1953, and studied photography at the London College of Printing. He has worked in the field of black-and-white landscape photography for more than four decades, producing images that are imbued with the legacy of nineteenth-century British landscape painters. He continues to work with film, favoring a small, almost square format that he sees as conferring a sense of intimacy. Many of his landscapes exposures are very long, grasping what the naked eye cannot see.

Kenna has lived in the United States since 1977, but travels widely, from Europe to Japan. His work has been exhibited around the world, notably in a retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2009, and features in many prestigious collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.