Capturing the Serenity Where Turmoil Reigns

By Margarett Loke
Sept. 28, 2001

Kenro Izu is partial to paradoxes. He lives in New York City in the 21st century, yet he follows in the footsteps of 19th-century landscape photographers. He goes on arduous treks to remote places, lugging a custom-made camera that produces 14-by-20-inch negatives; with the requisite accessories, it weighs about 300 pounds. And he makes his own platinum-palladium prints.

Mr. Izu, who was born in 1949 in Osaka, Japan, focuses on ancient stone monuments because they suggest the eternal and the transient. The idea that nothing is forever gives him ”such a peaceful feeling,” he has said. Since 1993, when he began his series on the Angkor temples in Cambodia, Mr. Izu has gone in search of another paradox: spiritual tranquillity in countries where serenity appears to be in short supply. They include Tibet, Myanmar, Laos, Indonesia, India and China.

”Sacred Places,” a show of this work, reveals the astonishing success of a seemingly impossible quest. The pictures are divided between the Howard Greenberg Gallery in SoHo and Sepia International in Chelsea. Taken in countries where political turmoil is common, the images convey a majestic stillness.

In Mr. Izu’s case, luck has very little to do with it. He has a superb eye. He has mastered his large format camera and the platinum-palladium process to give his prints richly textured details and atmospheric nuances. And he is nothing if not patient. For his triptych of countless figures of Buddha inside the Pak Ou Cave in Laos, Mr. Izu exposed his film for about four hours.

The two Manhattan galleries offer checklists with the images’ locations. But visitors who choose to dispense with them might see themselves happily lost somewhere in central Asia in vast empty lands free of borders. To the photographer’s eye, Mr. Izu has said, the same people and culture are found in Lhasa, Mustang and Ladakh. If there were no borders, he could have visited these areas in one trip. But he had to make separate excursions.

Lhasa fell under Chinese rule in 1950. Mustang, a high-altitude kingdom near the Tibetan border, is a semiautonomous region of Nepal. Ladakh, a part of ancient Tibet, was incorporated into India when Britain annexed it in the mid-19th century.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Izu’s images give no hint of political borders. At Howard Greenberg the Potala monastery in Lhasa is made unfamiliar in a distant view: it perches as if newly built atop a hill below a sky full of clouds. In an image taken in Mustang, a splendid moonscape sculptured by nature is the backdrop for a single prayer flag fluttering on a stick held in place by a few small stones. At Sepia, which displays pictures Mr. Izu took in India, there is an image of a familiar Tibetan monastery sitting on a mountaintop in Ladakh. A string of prayer flags flutter up from the monastery and out of camera range as if hooked to the sky.

Along the Silk Road in China’s arid northwest, Mr. Izu came across eroded stone monuments that appear to have more in common with ancient Egypt than ancient China. ”Xi Xia Wangling No. 38” (2000), for example, a royal tomb built in the 11th century, brings to mind the step pyramid in Saqqara. A magnificent triptych, ”Kizil Kara No. 102, Kucha, China” (2000), shows Buddhist temples carved sometime between the 3rd and 10th centuries in a range of low mountains. The temples are unobtrusive, as if the carvers were careful to do homage to the stark terrain, not unduly disrupt it.

Although the Indonesian island of Java is far from parched, Mr. Izu shows Borobudur, one of the world’s most extraordinary Buddhist temples, as if it, too, were in a land of dry mountains. In a lofty image, ”Borobudur No. 15, Indonesia” (1996), a stone figure of Buddha faces a distant mountain as it sits uncovered on top of a tower. Amazingly, Borobudur was lost to the rest of the world for about 1,000 years before it was rediscovered in 1814 during a brief British colonial period.

On his travels, Mr. Izu has found instances of Buddhism and Hinduism coexisting equably. The famous Ellora Caves in central India, dating from the 6th to 11th centuries, draw Buddhist, Hindu and Jain pilgrims. ”Ellora No. 1, India” (1996) is not so much peaceful as startling. In this image, the hallway of a Hindu temple is carved out of a sheer, forbidding cliff.

Equally suffused with drama is ”Vijayanagar No. 7, Hampi, India” (1996). Vijayanagar, once a powerful Hindu kingdom, was destroyed in the 16th century by a Muslim siege. In this image, four rough-hewn stone pillars support a stone slab, behind which is an immense rock that is a Hindu shrine. Almost playfully strewn about are stones large and small.

Rocks of varying sizes and shapes are an inescapable part of the ”Sacred Places” landscape. In ”Vijayanagar No. 15” they form the immense skull-like base of a Hindu shrine. In ”Vijayanagar No. 12,” miniature Stonehenge-like arrangements of stones dot the ground like sprouts on a potato, the surface of the ground set aglow by slanting rays of sunlight.

The role of the sun is important also in the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, ”Kailash No. 75.” In Tibet last year, Mr. Izu camped near a spot where he could see the north face of Mount Kailas, also known as Kailash. This mountain is revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Jains and followers of Bon, the ancient religion predating Buddhism in Tibet. The previous night’s snow had blanketed the mountain. But as the sun rose, a strong wind whipped the snow into a froth, turning the Kailas peak into a miraculous, otherworldly beacon in the surrounding dark.

”Kenro Izu: Sacred Places” is at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, 120 Wooster Street, SoHo, (212) 334-0010, through Oct. 20 and at Sepia International, 148 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 645-9444, through Oct. 25. A similar exhibition is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., (978) 745-9500, through Dec. 2. The book ”Kenro Izu: Sacred Places” is published by Arena Editions; ”Kenro Izo: Light Over Sacred Places of Asia” is published by the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan.