News

It has been a while since we added to our News page, mostly because we've been too busy working to stop and talk. For example, there was a really wonderful project for Vetro, involving bodies and swaths of fiberglass, some of which you can see here .

And we spent most of June on a HUGE project for Office Depot. We can't post it until it breaks in stores, but that will be soon.

Last fall we brought a digital system into the studio. Initially we just used it for jobs, but lately we've been using it on some of our own projects too. We will ad a digital portfolio page to this site soon.

We have just had portfolios published in two magazines in China. Photo World ran a general portfolio and Youth Vision showed work from Among Trees.

Speaking of Among Trees, the book has gotten some nice notices. Mark Rozzo at the New Yorker called it “arresting,” and Faith Middleton called it “wonderfully intelligent and inspiring” on NPR.

The magazine Lenswork will run a series from the book in October. They also published a revised version of the article Parsing the Good in their August issue. And Communication Arts published the graduation talk I gave at Rockport College in May. It's a graduation address for those of you who weren't paying attention the first time.

I will be extending some of these ideas in a talk at the Society for Photographic Education's regional conference on October 4. And I'll be talking at the Art Institute of Atlanta on October 23.

I will also be giving a seminar at this year's PhotoEast on November 1. After that I'm going to just shut up for a while.

For some reason we're having a spate of shows coming up. There's one at the Art Institute of Atlanta (October 1-31), one in France in April at Centre Regional de la Photographie, Pas de Calais,, and there's talk of one in Chicago some time early in the New Year.

There's some new work emerging. I'm calling it The Travellers, and it is exciting because it is taking me in a lot of new directions, all at once. I'm not quite ready to show it yet, but m here's a peek. For the rest, be patient.

Reviews for Among Trees

The New Yorker, Mark Rozzo
In the photographer Sean Kernan's arresting Among Trees (Artisan), New York's trees appear as boulevardiers decked out in Christmas lights. Kernan traversed the planet in search of tangled roots and dappled canopies, and his photographs frame trees as peaceful neighbors of the earth's human residents: palms arch into the Los Angeles twilight, and the unidentified specimen shares plaza space with an elderly Segovian gent. Kernan also plays with scale: a row of Tuscan poplars, sizable by human standards, is dwarfed by an electrical tower.

National Public Radio, Faith Middleton
Sean Kernan is a remarkable photographer who lives and works in Stony Creek, Connecticut. His most recent book is a gorgeous work about trees. Anthony Doerr, the fiction writer, has done a great introduction to the book, and Sean Kernan's explanation of his creative process for the pictures is so inspiring that I wanted to go out and get a camera right away. I also wanted to paint, to draw, to sing songs, to make movies. It is wonderfully intelligent and inspiring.

Photo District News, Julie Gray
In a sense, Sean Kernan's collection of black-and-white tritone images of trees returns to photography's roots; as John Szarkowsi has noted, trees were a popular subject for the pioneering 19th century English amateurs of William Henry Fox Talbot's time. But "roots" is not really the right word to use when talking about Among Trees because the photographs in it tend to focus not on the bases of trees but on their lovely canopies of leaves, branches and sky. As short-story author Anthony doer, who wrote an introduction to the book, points out: "So often Kernan's images of trees lead our eyes toward sky." He's right: many of the photos in this collection are dappled with almost blinding patches of sky that break through the branches of the trees.

There is a quiet serenity about many of the photos, and the mists and fogs in which the trees are pillowed, all sharp angles and perspectives softened, create a mystical atmosphere that invites contemplation. Kernan's photos are largely unpeopled, although both mankind’s cultivation and destruction of trees are represented, from an orchard in Greece, with a ladder leaning against a tree, to the ruthless lumbering of Washington State.

To amass these 115 images, Kernan traveled the world, visiting, as he says in his introduction to the book, "the redwood forests of California, the pines of northern Greece, the foggy hardwoods of New England"- not to mention China, Italy, England, Hawaii, among other places. Kernan, whose last publication, The Secret Books, was a collection of black-and-white still lifes of books, with a text by novelist Jorge Luis Borges, finds time to work on his own projects while teaching (he has led courses at the New School and the Maine Photographic Workshops, for instance) and shooting for commercial clients (AT&T, Microsoft, Tropicana, among others).

The book is beautifully designed, and the reproductions in it are good enough to convey the richness of Kernan’s original prints.

Dallas News
Trees are ever-present symbols of quiet strength, though for the most part, we take them for granted – an indifference challenged by photographer Sean Kernan's Among Trees . Every tree featured here is a portrait of grace and beauty, whether in wild or urban environments. Some appear untouched by human influence; other images comment on trees' relationships with people, such as the single tree adorned with Christmas lights in a shop window, or an empty chair that appears waiting for an occupant, at the base of a lone tree in a park in Paris. The photographs are sensitive and intimate; a few are clichéd. Overall, though, they'll remind readers of the pleasures of pausing to appreciate the shape, texture and presence of these living beings around us.