For over 45 years, Paul Kenny’s photographs have mused on “landscape, the earth, the fragility, the power and beauty of nature.” But not just mused. Kenny’s images make contact with earth’s constellated matter. They accumulate, they construct. Scavenging beaches for pebbles, shells, and washed-up junk from far-away cities, Kenny composes little galaxies of debris on glass plates. The seawater evaporates, its residuum crystalline and cosmic. In some images, fishing line divides the frame like horizons below a starry, starry night. The “negatives” are scanned and printed. What remains is what the late Roger Caillois called l’écriture des pierres, the writing of stones.
Caillois, whose words accompany Kenny’s photographs below, never tired of the way nature seemed to sketch itself onto the very core of itself, long before we dream-debauched bipeds ever picked up a brush. “No matter what image an artist invents, no matter how distorted, arbitrary, absurd, simple, elaborate, or tortured he has made it or how far in appearance from anything known or probable, who can be sure that somewhere in the world’s vast store there is not that image’s likeness, its kin or partial parallel” in the rocks and wood and clouds?
To be sure, Kenny’s photographs, or photoglyphs (as I like to think of them), more than justify the hunch.