FLESH of STONE was born out of the encounter, some ten years ago, between the celebrated English photographer Michael Kenna and the French author and art critic Zoe Balthus. The writer invited the great artist to dig into his archives in search of the human figure, whose fleeting presence she had sometimes perceived in some of his minimalist black & white landscapes, to which he owes his international fame.

The intuition was right. In the course of decades of travel around the world, Michael Kenna has not been able to resist the statuary and its splendid human representations he had come across in the gardens, parks, places of worship and memory. More than seventy analogue masterpieces were thus brought to light to compose FLESH of STONE.