John Kenny

Portrait of Ancho by John Kenny. C-type print with acrylic face-mount, 2009

2009

Ancho is a Hamer woman from the Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia. John met her on his first journey to the region in 2006. Her portrait was featured on the front cover of a number o...

A Rendille girl in Kenya A return to Kenya. On this trip John took a different approach to lighting. Building makeshift studios from locally acquired white sheets held up by four ...

Photography printed on Fine art Hahnemuhle paper. Signed and numbered 2/5 on the back by the artist.

René Peña (Rene de Jesus Pena Gonzalez) is a self-taught photographer born in Havana, Cuba in 1957. His photography is characterized by stark contrasts, between black and white, subject and background, subject and object. His work often focuses on the duality between human inability to escape institutionalization and human desire for individualism. His interest in contrast is also reflected in his place of residence: Peña currently inhabits the Cerro neighborhood of Cuba which is home to a mostly poor African-Caribbean population, despite having been an enclave of Havana's richest families in the 19th century. René Peña graduated from the Higher pedagogic Institute of Foreign Languages, University of Havana with a specialization in English in 1983. In the late 1980s he entered the national world of photography and since 1990 became leader of the new trends of Cuban photography...