In the winter of 2002, on a morning of relentless snow, Michael Kenna came upon a Japanese oak on the banks of Kussharo Lake in Hokkaido. The lake lay frozen white; hungry swans called across the ice. In his account, the tree suggested an oversized bonsai—elegant, graphically powerful, with something quintessentially Japanese in its shape, reminiscent of a woodblock print. The ninety-second installment of Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series is devoted to that subject, and the publisher describes it as the artist’s farewell to one of his favorite subjects. Known locally as Kenna’s Tree, it was cut down at a very old age in August 2009.
That arc gives this small hardcover its shape. The book is not a survey of the tree across seasons or years. It holds sixteen pages and thirteen four-color plates, gathering the subject as Kenna saw it in conditions he calls brutally cold. The brevity is part of the argument: thirteen plates do not document a place so much as hold one subject up to the light, so that small shifts of snow, light, and reflection register as variations on a single form.
The volume also belongs to the series’ distinctive publishing logic. Alongside the plates, it includes one signed original photograph by Kenna, making the book at once a sequence of reproductions and a container for a primary print. That pairing places it among photographic publications that treat page and print as related but not identical. The hardcover binding and modest scale keep the emphasis on the plates and that signed photograph.
For a collector, the interest is not simply that the tree no longer stands. It is that the felling of 2009 fixes these photographs as a specific kind of record, made while the subject existed and published as a deliberate farewell. Kenna’s comparison to the bonsai and the woodblock print is more than a description of a silhouette; it situates the work in relation to Japanese image-making while leaving his own long exposures and tonal control intact. One tree, one winter, a handful of plates, one signed photograph—the book’s concentration is what makes it cohere.
