Two concurrent exhibitions at the Musée de la Photographie in Nice showcase the virtuosity of analog images
Michael Kenna can spend ten hours waiting for a single photograph. Not ten hours travelling to a location, or ten hours setting up equipment, but ten hours standing in the cold with his camera shutter open, accumulating light on film while the world moves around him.
The British photographer is the subject of Constellation, a major retrospective at the Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre in Nice, which presents 124 photographs across 21 countries. Running alongside it is Camera Obscura, an exhibition by Niçois artist Michel Graniou who has spent 45 years making images with an updated model of the oldest camera in existence.
The pairing makes unexpected sense. Both artists work in black and white. Both print their own images on silver gelatin paper. Both treat photography as something closer to meditation than documentation. And together they pose a question worth considering: What happens when photography refuses to hurry?
Video via IgNiceMan on YouTube
Michael Kenna, Constellations – through 25 January 2026
The Man Who Captures Time on Film
For more than fifty years, British photographer Michael Kenna has been exploring the globe with with his trusted Hasselblad cameras. Displaying a rare sensitivity, he captures the imprint of time, the memory of places and the silent poetry of landscapes. His retrospective Constellation is representative of the major series that mark the photographer’s career: natural, urban and industrial landscapes from around the world, spanning from industrial England to formal French gardens, and Detroit factories to Korean mountains.
Michael Kenna – photo © Tsuyoshi Kato, 2023
The exhibition highlights the coherence and depth of a body of work in which each photograph seems suspended between the visible and the invisible. It offers an intimate journey across the earth, guided by an artist who, with humility and rigour, reminds us of the beauty of the world through the power of his gaze and the call of silence.
Silence is an important concept in Michael Kenna’s life. His darkroom is his chapel. For half a century, he has spent solitary hours there, printing images by hand on silver gelatin paper. He describes the process as meditation, sometimes approaching religious experience. It makes sense when you learn he spent seven years at a Catholic seminary before art won out.
Fifty Five Birds, Wolverton, Buckinghamshire, England. 1991
His seminary training included something called magnum silentium, ten to twelve hours of mandatory silence each day. The practice of calm, patience, and stillness proved useful. His photographs are made at dawn or deep in the night, often in conditions that send most people indoors. He uses exposures lasting hours, occasionally an entire night. Moving water turns to mist, clouds become streaks of light. Trees blur into calligraphy against skies that record cumulative time rather than frozen moments. Time itself becomes visible.
He works in small formats, typically eight by ten inches, a deliberate choice that demands intimacy. Viewers must step close, then back, discovering the image in stages.
(left) Onishi Tree Shadow, Study 2, Hokkaido, Japan. 2023 (right) Haruna Fuji, Study 2, Gunma, Honshu, Japan. 2025
Since his first visit in 1987, Japan has anchored his practice, and the influence of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism can be felt in every image. Photography becomes an offering to what stands there, in the almost-nothing. The void is not a lack, but a space for the eye to breathe, so that the soul can enter into dialogue with the image.
“I feel like I’m asking for permission. I’m waiting for a sign. I feel like I’m in communion with our surroundings, as if I were in dialogue with nature,” Kenna explains. “I don’t photograph what I see, I photograph what I can imagine.” The images contain no people, which curator Sabine Troncin-Denis describes as essential to their power. Without human figures, viewers supply their own presence. The photographs become spaces to inhabit rather than scenes to observe.
Video via France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur on YouTube
Kenna, who now lives in Seattle, is still prolifically productive at age 72. He has published over 100 monographs, held more than 500 solo exhibitions, and photographed across 43 countries. His work appears in permanent collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In 2022, he donated his entire body of work to France, consisting of 3,683 prints, 175,000 more negatives, 6,422 working prints, 1,280 Polaroids, and complete archives documenting 50 years of work. It now resides at the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie outside Paris. The gift also included his haunting photographs of Nazi concentration camps, a twelve-year project that took him repeatedly to Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and dozens of other sites across Europe. The seed for that work was planted in art school when a classmate returned from Poland with a photograph of a mountain of shaving brushes found at a camp. Kenna found it impossible to forget.
Génie de la Science, Observatoire, Nice, 1996 – – Collection musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre, Nice
Plongeoir, bains militaires, Nice, 1996 – Collection musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre, Nice
La Trappa, Vieille Ville, Nice, France, 1996 – Donation Michael Kenna, ministère de la Culture, MPP
In 1997, Kenna visited Nice for the first time as part of a city commission inviting ten photographers to interpret the place. He remembers needing police escort to photograph the Colline du Château cemetery at night. Five images from that visit appear in the show, including four recent donations to the museum’s permanent collection.
Curator Troncin-Denis calls him “a great writer of photography,” comparing his images to poetry. The prints are inhabited, she says, containing something beyond what the camera captured.
Courtesy Ville de Nice
Michel Graniou, Camera Obscura – through February 22, 2026
The Man Who Masters ‘The Chamber of Wonders’
The complementary exhibition, Camera Obscura, documents Michel Graniou’s use of the type of device Nicéphore Niépce, French inventor and pioneer of photography, employed to make the first permanent photograph in the early 19th century.
Graniou spent his professional life documenting regional architecture and artwork, jobs that eventually moved to digital technology. His personal work, however, has stayed analogue. For 45 years he has photographed using the camera obscura and printed using 19th-century processes: platinum palladium, cyanotype, wet collodion. Each print can consume an entire day. This sounds very involved in the digital era – and it is. But that is its whole charm.
Camera Obscura presents 70 images organised as a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. The exhibition opens with a photograph taken from inside the camera itself, placing visitors where film would sit during exposure. Stone lions bracket the view, one awake, one sleeping. Carved wooden columns face twisted narwhal teeth, those medieval “unicorn horns” that commanded fortunes in European collections.
Graniou’s careful arrangements of antiquities and natural objects suggest ritual as much as art.
He divides his work into three categories matching Renaissance classifications.
- Naturalia: fragments of the natural world, minerals and plants.
- Artificialia: objects made by human hands, antiquities and sculptures.
- Mirabilia: wondrous creations, which for Graniou means photographs of women.
(left) Michel Graniou. Alpes Maritimes.Tirage au Palladium. 04 / (right) Michel Graniou. Nice. Musée Barla.Tirage au Palladium. 03
Subjects deliberately resist clear identification. Is that coral or fossilised wood? Bone or carved stone? A mineral formation or an artifact worn smooth by centuries? The uncertainty is intentional. He wants viewers to linger, to question, to abandon the need for immediate answers.
He photographs still lifes almost exclusively, arrangements that create visual puzzles layering opposites: Shadow and light, death and life, solid and ethereal. His subjects come from the Alpes-Maritimes, his home region that has sustained him throughout his life. He has exhibited with Galerie Chave in nearby Vence since 1996 and his work appears in public and private collections. This show marks both his 70th birthday and four decades since his first Nice exhibition at Galerie Mossa.
“Such photographic art is a mystical experience. Through the soul of the paper, each print celebrates the silver, gold or platinum wedding between light and the photographer’s eye.”
— Jean Paul Potron, chief curator of libraries, Nice
The Reward for Slowness
Film photography is experiencing a resurgence among photographers who grew up digital. They buy second-hand cameras at inflated prices, book darkroom workshops months ahead, learn to work with chemistry that cannot be rushed. The appeal lies partly in the physical nature of the process and partly in enforced patience. Film photography eliminates the option of instant results but gratifies with unexpected depth.
Kenna and Graniou represent the same conviction from different angles. Kenna has travelled constantly, seeking landscapes that reward long exposure. Graniou has stayed close to home, finding inexhaustible material within his native region. Both insist the camera is merely the starting point. The real work happens afterwards, alone in darkness, where printing becomes interpretation and patience becomes a form of vision.
Michel Graniou. Nice. tirage sur papier baryté au clorobromure d’argent. 01
Hosting these exhibitions together at the museum which takes its name from Charles Nègre, a 19th-century photographer who demonstrated the medium could achieve both technical precision and artistic depth, makes a case about what photography becomes when given time. As curator Troncin-Denis observes, these images are inhabited. They contain more than their surfaces suggest. That quality cannot be captured quickly. It must be grown, slowly, in darkness and silence.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Michael Kenna: Constellation – through January 25, 2026
Michel Graniou: Camera Obscura – through February 22, 2026
Museum open 10am to 6pm daily except Mondays and public holidays
Tickets: €5, concessions available https://museephotographie.nice.fr/tarifs/
CONTACT DETAILS
Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre
1, place Pierre Gautier
06300 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 97 13 42 20
web: www.museephotographie.nice.fr
email: musee.photo@ville-nice.fr
Lead image by Mustafi Numann on Unsplash, licenced under the Unsplash License; all other images courtesy Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre and Ville de Nice and as credited
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