Rouge: Michael Kenna
The Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, was once considered the most advanced factory in the world and an icon of American industrial achievement. It was at the Rouge, designed by Albert Kahn, house architect to Henry Ford, that the modern-day industrial complex was born, using shed architecture and glass walls that were both lightweight and inexpensive and brought diffused light directly onto the factory floor. From its origins, the Rouge came to be a vast complex containing miles of railroad tracks, blast furnaces, coke ovens, a foundry, and enormous storage areas for holding the raw materials to be used in manufacturing—a veritable city unto itself for the industrial age.
From almost the beginning, the Rouge drew visitors. From 1924 to 1982, as many as a quarter of a million visitors a year toured parts of the Rouge, including the steel operations, assembly line, and occasionally the Engine Plant and Glass Plant. For a time, the Rouge drew visitors seeking inspiration for the new, including artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who spent time studying the Rouge’s facilities for Rivera’s murals Detroit Industry, and the American photographer Charles Sheeler, who was commissioned in 1927 to carry out a series of photographs that would exalt the achievements of this new emblem of industrial progress. Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company (1927) became perhaps the best-known single image of the Rouge, embraced as “the finest image of technological utopia.”
Kenna’s work at the Rouge continued the artist’s long and profound relationship with the industrial landscape that had begun during his upbringing in a highly industrial town in northwest England. These influences found photographic form when Kenna began to photograph the cotton and wool mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 1980s. In these works and the Rouge images made a decade later, we find a number of themes and strategies critical to Kenna’s work as a photographer: an interest in photographing under low-light conditions and even at night; a concern for reflections and the image doubling they create; a fascination with the contrasts between the strong linearity of the built environment and the effacing atmosphere around it; the absence of people. Some of these strategies required long exposures, which Kenna has described as an “accumulation of light, time, and movement, impossible for the human eye to take in.” Despite the fact that parts of the Rouge complex were operational at the time of Kenna’s work there, the resulting images seem caught up with memory, with the mere traces of human activity, and in this there is something both highly temporal and seemingly monolithic and outside of time.
Michael Kenna recently returned to the images he had made in the 1990s and selected an additional fifty images for inclusion in the published series, which becomes the occasion for Rouge: Michael Kenna, an exhibition that displays approximately one third of the published body of work. The expanded series evidences remarkable versatility both in subject matter and in photographic strategy, even as Kenna’s eye is everywhere drawn to dynamic design: crisscrossed conveyors; smokestacks illuminated against a night sky; the sweeping curve of a moored freighter. The Princeton University Art Museum is proud to be the only repository for the whole of Kenna’s published work at the Rouge, work that seems newly resonant in an age in which we are once again questioning the legacy and meaning of America’s industrial past, as well as the significance of the relics and sites of that past at locations such as the Rouge.
James Christen Steward
Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director