Michael Kenna, Pico Iyer: Same Sun Same Moon

This elegant collaboration pairs Michael Kenna’s luminous black-and-white landscapes with Pico Iyer’s contemplative prose, tracing the parallels of two lives lived in motion.

Though they didn’t meet until their sixties, photographer Michael Kenna and writer Pico Iyer had been unknowingly following similar paths for decades. Both were born in England, studied near Oxford in the 1970s, moved to the U.S. West Coast, and fell in love with Japan. This book brings their work together in a profoundly personal collaboration: more than sixty of Kenna’s prints, each accompanied by short texts both from Iyer and Kenna themselves. Kenna’s work—minimalist, often made in long exposure—captures fleeting moments of calm and clarity: a fog-bound canal in Venice, a deserted jetty in Mallorca, a line of trees dissolving into snow in Hokkaido. Spanning fifty years and five continents, these photographs offer meditations shaped by light, shadow, and quiet transformation. In prose that mirrors the restraint and depth of the images, Iyer writes about travel, childhood, coincidence, and the invisible threads that connect us. Beautifully printed and designed for slow reading and close looking, Same Sun Same Moon is a book for art lovers, writers, travelers, and anyone drawn to the subtle interplay of image and word, solitude and connection.