KENRO IZU

By Kay Larson, July 15, 2018

KENRO IZU: NEW PROJECTS
In the renowned photographic series, “Sacred Places,” 1979-2003, Kenro Izu journeyed around the world to visit spiritual sites revered by many cultures and peoples. In the summer of 2018, he is presenting two new photographic projects.

“Eternal Light of India,” consists of portraits taken in Varanasi, the ancient city on the banks of the Ganges, in 2013-2016; these images are collected into a book published in 2018. The “City of Light” is a destination for the Hindu elderly and those with terminal diseases, who seek to die and be cremated here, and who believe they will attain moksha (liberation from the endless cycle of rebirth) at this site.

“Requiem,” 2015-2017 is about Pompeii, the Roman city in the south of Italy that was buried by up to 20 feet of volcanic ash when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The city’s 11,000 inhabitants and their houses were preserved underneath the ash layer for centuries. When they were found, wet plaster was poured into the voids where human bodies once lay. These original plaster casts have been housed in an archival building in Pompeii ever since. A second set of casts occasionally appears in traveling museum exhibitions.

He chose to make a collective portrait of the people of Pompeii. He was given permission to place selected figures from the second set of plaster casts in various locations within the city’s ruined architecture. To achieve this, special art handlers lifted the casts onto stretchers and carried them through the streets to the chosen sites. “Requiem” envisions a scene sometime after “the day”—the hours when the skies rained ruin. He realized that in our time, “the day” could well be a nuclear explosion, which would create this kind of destruction. In sympathy with the people of Pompeii, he has made a link between their time and ours.

KENRO IZU: A LIFE
Kenro Izu was born in Osaka, Japan in 1949. In high school, while pursuing an interest in science, hoping to become a doctor, he attached a camera to a microscope to make pictures of bacteria and other micro-organisms. He soon discovered that pointing a camera at landscapes and people was even more fascinating. He entered Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo.

He moved to the United States in 1971. A few years later, in 1979, in search of his path of life through photography, he chose one of the seven wonders of the world, Giza Pyramids in Egypt, as the first place to visit. From then on, to the present moment, he says he has never had to search for his next project. The subjects lead him, or the location guides him, or the places themselves seem to call him. His pilgrimages have taken him to Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Ladakh, Mustang, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Tibet, China, Easter Island, Peru, and Bhutan.

In Egypt, he witnessed flowing sand and dust eroding four-thousand-year-old temples half-buried by the wind, their pleas to the gods of the ancients forgotten. In the 1980s, he photographed the immense stone circles created and abandoned by Neolithic peoples in England, Scotland, Wales, and France. A spiritual presence remains palpable in these places. “Spirituality has been the single most important element of my photography throughout my career,” he has said.

The photography world acclaimed the images he created in Angkor Wat, Cambodia. He made several trips (1993-1997) to this former capital of the Khmer Kingdom, built in the twelfth century. Angkor is a city of stones, most of them carved with glorious Buddhist and Hindu imagery, now losing its fight with time and gravity. The walls and hallways of Angkor—weeping with lichen and ivy, toppled by their own weight, strangled by the enormous aerial roots of banyan trees—speak of the glory and necessity of great beauty, and the inevitability of loss. As with all his early photographs, the stones of Angkor stand alone, with no humans in sight. An ache of melancholy fills these places of ancient spiritual ambition.

In Cambodia, he had a collision with the present, and it changed both his photography and his life’s purpose. He was passing through the ancient city of Siem Riep, in the last days of the Cambodian civil war. He could hear gunfire in the hills. He met children who had been maimed by land mines or hurt by illness. He saw a girl lying on a bed in a local hospital. She had been carried by her father from a remote village. The journey had used up all the family’s money; none was left to pay doctors at the hospital. She died from a preventable disease, as he watched helplessly.

He has said that he felt as crushed as if he had lost his own daughter. He called friends in the United States and Japan, and together they started a not-for-profit organization, Friends Without A Border, in 1996. The foundation built and sustains Angkor Hospital for Children, which has treated more than 1.6 million patients since it opened in 1999 in Siem Riep. The foundation’s second project, Laos Friends Hospital for Children, opened in Luang Pragang, Lao, in 2015.

In the year 2000, he began the first of two journeys to one of the remotest parts of Tibet, the plateau that surrounds Mt. Kailash, a pyramidal peak, 22,000 feet high. He photographed the snow mountain in brilliant sunlight as the lower peaks collected shadows. Two years later he came back with porters, yaks, tents and a cook. He intended to do a Kora, the Tibetan word for a 32-mile ritual journey around the peak, a circumambulation thought by Tibetan Buddhists to wipe away a lifetime of bad karma. His forward progress was halted by snow, fog, a yak driver who took the yaks with him when he abandoned camp, and his own despair.

He could do nothing but curl up in a sleeping bag, in a small tent in the snow, for days. On the tent’s ceiling, drops of water gradually formed. Once in a while a drop rolled down the slope of the tent fabric. Observing the drops became a meditation: a concentration on a single element for a length of time. He did this for days. Then a revelation came.

He sensed a shift in his mind. He jumped out into the field. The fog and snow that had been irritating him seemed fresh and different. Suddenly he was loving them. Looking around more carefully, he noticed tiny grasses behind the rocks, and a little stream of water, previously overlooked. He saw the error in his reliance on the eye’s vision alone. He had forgotten to look for what is beyond sight. He closed his eyes and began to sense the existence of Mt. Kailash. He made no photographs on that trip, but he finished the Kora.

Afterward, he felt that something had shifted. The experience of seeking help for Cambodian children, and the passage through doubt and despair on Mt. Kailash, contributed to a new interest in photographing people during a trip to Bhutan. Traveling through sacred spots in this Buddhist country, he realized he had chosen a place where spiritual practice continues as a part of the people’s daily life. He invited monks and nuns to sit for portraits, and he sought out ordinary people whose lives seem touched by inner reflection. “I sensed that sacredness is not in their temples but within the people,” he says.

Altogether, he has spent eight years on repeated visits to India: to Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim and Christian holy places, whether they are ruins or active sites of worship and spiritual reflection. On an early trip to Varanasi, he witnessed bodies being cremated on the banks of the river Ganges, and he watched a family chatting cheerfully after their relative’s corpse turned to ash. He resolved to view death differently. His 2018 book Eternal Light is an immersion in these elemental truths.

KENRO IZU: TECHNIQUE
Over the years, his cameras have evolved. At first, when he enlarged his prints from 4×5 or 5×7 negatives, they didn’t satisfy him. In the 1980s, for the series “Sacred Places,” he sought a camera big enough to allow him to make contact prints. He consulted with Jack Deardorff, a view-camera maker in Chicago, who made him a camera in 14×20 format, which obliged him to make prints directly, without enlargement. For the next 30 years, he traveled with this camera, four lenses, tripods and supports, film in X-ray-shielded bags, and other equipment weighing, altogether, 300 pounds or more.

When he saw Paul Strand’s platinum photographs, early in his career, he was impressed by the way that platinum printing allows an infinite range of warm grays. He felt that this was the method to depict the density of sacred air. It was an extremely important decision, he feels. The air in sacred sites is of course the same as it is anywhere else, but an emotional intensity “colors” these places and saturates the atmosphere in one’s imagination and recollection.

He has continued to experiment with platinum and its variations. In 2001-2004, in his New York City studio, he began a series, “BLUE,” inspired by the essay “In Praise of Shadow,” by Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. For “BLUE” he developed a method of printing in very dark blue, by layering platinum and Cyano sensitizer on watercolor paper. The effect is both sensual and eerie.

For “Requiem,” he chose medium-format digital cameras with the availability of very wide-angle lenses. Their extremely high resolution allows him to make very large prints. He prefers black-and-white photography because its simplicity gives more opportunity for the imagination. sBlack-and-white photography is not as literal as color. Giving precedence to black and white is a natural continuation and expression of his meditative approach to his medium.

Clearly, he continues to evolve both his methods and his ways of evoking a subtle metaphysical spookiness that may be felt all over the world, within the life that we typically call “ordinary.”