The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Friday March 14th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Friday March 14th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Friday March 14th — —

California

We have been a fan of the work of New York-based Mikael Kennedy for some years now and really appreciate his latest series ‘California’. The series captures one week in California in which the photographer is clearly on the move. The beautiful photographs with the familiar toned down color palette show the wide landscapes of the American state with only sometimes allowing traces of civilization to play a minor role within the frame. A road, roadside fences, an electrical cable, the inside of the car a photograph was taken in, and just a little glimpse of a house. Kennedy places the geographical entity of the state of California first and its inhabitants second. The pictures therefore evoke somewhat of a lonely and melancholic sentiment within the beauty of the depicted landscapes, making the urge to visit the beautiful area even greater. ‘California’ has been published by Done To Death Projects in a limited quantity zine of 100 pieces which sold out within four days.

I love that dawning of the moment inside of awe. I get it often, it’s the moment of cresting the hill and watching the world open up in front of you.

Mikael Kennedy is a New York City-based commercial and fine art photographer. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed Polaroid travel blog; Passport to Trespass, documenting his 10 years of wandering the United States with a Polaroid SX70. Kennedy’s Polaroids are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX as well as in private collections worldwide. Having appeared in print in The New Yorker, Nylon, Dazed & Confused, WWD, Kennedy’s photography has been being profiled online with GQ, Esquire, Time, Newsweek Magazine, and the WSJ. He won ‘Cover of the Year’ in Munich at the 2011 BCP Awards for EB Magazine featuring a photograph from his American landscape series ‘The Odysseus’.

For more information on the work of Mikael Kennedy see here.