Kenro Izu - Sacred Places - 2001

„When I encountered this tree, standing upon the temple with such authority, I was filled with thoughts that surpassed such mundane notions as life or death. I felt that when I encountered a moment, wondered of my own existence, this tree may have an answer (Tree in Angkor, Cambodia 1993)."
- Kenro Izu -

VERY BEAUTIFUL BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES by Japanese-born photographer Kenro Izu, born 1949 in Osaka, based in the United States. Kenro Izu is the founder of children's charity Friends Without a Border, for which he has received two awards. He has also been awarded for his photography.

The book is showing difficult-to-reach spiritual places reflect the dedicated soul of photographer Kenro Izu, who traveled to these places with a specially made large-format camera that weighs 300 pounds. He used the camera to make 14x20 contact platinum/palladium prints of places of worship as diverse as Easter Island, Teotihuacán, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, the monuments of the Chinese Silk Road, and the caves of Ajanta, among other sites.
The great 19th-century photographs of Asia were part of his inspiration, but Izu's work is uniquely his own. An essay by photographic historian Clark Worswick provides an overview of his life and work. The large format of the book allows for sumptuous presentation of the images.

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"During the 1980s, Kenro Izu began making photographs of difficult-to-reach places. Invariably, for want of a better description, these were places that were possessed of "spirituality." Izu made "documents" of places of worship as diverse as Easter Island, Teotihuacán, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, the monuments of the Chinese Silk Road, Palmyra, Mustang, Hampi, the caves of Ajanta, Borobudur, Pagan, and Lhasa. The work was painstakingly slow. Since creating those first images in the 1980s, Izu has continued his travels, making numerous journeys to these out-of-the-way places. Sacred Places, which follows the success of Still Life, Izu's first book with Arena Editions, represents the first major compilation of these magnificent travel images - images that truly defy simple description. Izu has single-handedly raised photography to a point that was lost somewhere in the nineteenth century. This work springs from the artist's careful scrutiny of the genre of the great nineteenth-century "exotic" photographs of Asia - the work that flourished from the banks of the Nile and Cairo to the quayside of Yokohama between 1859 and 1879."
(fro the publisher)

Arena Editions, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 2001. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 310 x 260 mm. 188 pages. Photos: Kenro Izu. Design: David Skolkin. Essay: Clark Worswick. Text in English.

Condition:
Book inside and outside fresh and flawless; clean with no marks and with no foxing. Dustjacket fresh and complete with no tears, with no taped tears and with no missing parts; spine sunned. Overall fine condition.

Great photobook by Kenro Izu in fresh condition - with the original dustjacket.

While still a teenager, Kenro Izu began photographing the landscape of his homecity Osaka, Japan. He subsequently studied photography at the Nippon University College of Art in Tokyo. In 1972, aged 21, Izu moved to New York, where he opened his own studio in 1975. In 1979, he began to photograph Egyptian pyramids and landscapes. In 1984, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, D.C.), which enabled him to start working on a series about sacred places all over the world – in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, England, Scotland, Mexico, France and Easter Island. He finally focused on Buddhist and Hindu monuments in South-East-Asia - Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam and India. Izu works hard to assure that his photos convey the spiritual essence of these sacred sites, which have touched people of various faiths and creeds for centuries. Many of these sites are now at risk due to negligence, pollution or excessive tourism. Izu used to travel for weeks through remote areas, far away from civilization, carrying with him a custom-made 330 lb camera for close-ups and a limited number of negatives, sized 14.2 x 20.1 in. After his arrival, he first searched for the ideal perspective and sometimes waited for hours for the perfect light and air density.
In his studio, Izu prints the negatives on watercolour paper, which he hand-coats himself with a light-sensitive solution, that contains platinum chloride and adds a glossy depth to his prints. He is one of the few photographers, who still use the platinum palladium print technique, and has dedicated his life to the art of photography and the perfection of the platinum printing process.
Kenro Izu’s works can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston as well as in a host of other public and private collections.