About Malcolm Kahn
I have been photographing seriously for most of my adult life, on weekends, while running companies during the week and raising a family. For close to fifty years that meant sixty plus hour weeks and a camera that came out on Saturday. I never promoted any of it. There was no time, and frankly there was no plan.
My businesses also required extensive travel. Decades of it, which put me in front of landscapes, cities, and coastlines I would never have gone looking for on my own. New York and the American West, Iceland, Europe, Asia. I was there for other reasons and I brought photography gear along, often far too much of it, for fear of not having what I needed when the light finally arrived. I was after the same things everywhere I went: structure, defining light, and fine detail, with the aim of seeing commonly visited places in a way they had not been seen before.
I am based in northern New Jersey, have three grown children, and am blessed with five wonderful grandchildren.
What I photograph
The geometry of a skyline. A solitary lighthouse. The scale of a western landscape. Mostly I am after the few minutes when the light turns a familiar place into something you have not seen before, which is a narrow window and usually means being somewhere uncomfortable at an inconvenient hour.
Many of the panoramas are built from dozens of separate high-resolution frames, sometimes fifty or sixty, assembled into one photograph. That is what lets the detail hold up at ninety inches or more. They are meant to work from across a room and then work again from two feet away, where you keep finding detail. Those are two different problems.
This site is not an archive of everywhere I have been. Most of what I have shot is not here. What is here is what I think stands on its own.
The Craft
I control the whole thing, from climbing a mountain for the location and waiting for the light, through developing and refining, to the finished print and its presentation on the wall. I use the highest resolution equipment I can carry, currently a 66-megapixel camera and mostly prime lenses, for the greatest detail, color depth, and dynamic range. I still make most of the prints and framing in my studio.
Prints are made on a forty-four inches wide Epson giclée printer with its twelve archival pigment ink set, and fine art papers chosen image by image. I typically make several prints of a photograph before I print the one you will receive. It is actually the other half of photography I love and most photographers never experience.
The face mounting is done by a specialist lab. I did all of it myself for years, with large piece taking about fifteen hours to complete with no way to recover a mistake made at the final step. The lab holds a standard I could not match on my own, and it can do things that are not possible in my studio.
Every piece carries two numbered tamper-proof seals, one on the artwork and one on the certificate of authenticity that comes with it.
None of this is efficient. It is how I want the work to arrive, and how I want it to hang.
Inquiries & Acquisitions
Prints are available in a range of sizes, framed or face-mounted on acrylic. Custom sizing and site-specific installations can be accommodated. Trade terms are available for designers and architects.
For acquisitions, commissions, or questions about a particular work, please fill out the form at the bottom of the Details & Purchasing page, or email me at:
Instagram: @malcolmkahnphoto
