NORTHERN ENGLAND 1983-1986

First edition. Limited edition. Signed by the photographer and the author of the introduction. Publisher's original black and white speckled cotton covered boards with a black and white photograph and titles in black to the upper board, titles in black to the spine. With 75 quadratone photographic plates printed on a natural textured art paper. A fine copy.

Issued in a limited edition of 3000 copies. This example is signed by the photographer Michael Kenna and by the author of the introduction Ian B. Glover in black ink on the title page. Michael Kenna was born in the small industrial town of Widnes in northwest England. The youngest of six children, Kenna grew up in a poor, working-class, Irish-Catholic family. He attended a seminary school for seven years with the intention of becoming a priest, after which he studied at the Banbury School of Art and later at the London College of Printing, before moving to the USA in the late seventies. The adjoining counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where Kenna photographed in the early eighties, have much in common regarding their industrial development. Fiercely competitive, they share a border, a spine of mountains known locally as the Pennines, which helps to produce rain. The rise of the powerful cotton and wool industry, and the building of innumerable mills, canals, railways, chimneys and terraced worker houses, have been attributed in part to these high levels of precipitation. The local textile industry proliferated until the second half of the twentieth century, when there was a sudden, rapid decline and eventual decimation. It was during this precise time period that Kenna returned to the area to photograph, during the day and also and at night. Kenna's early photographs of England launched his career and brought him international acclaim; yet it wasn't until 2020, that he revisited this body of work to find many unprinted images, many of which are exquisitely presented in this monograph.