Echoes of Prayer and People

By David Gonzalez
Jan. 10, 2013

How do we live? How do we die? What do we think? Those are the questions that occupy Kenro Izu.

“I love photography,” Mr. Izu said. “So what does a photographer do to find the meaning of life?”

How about hauling 300 pounds of gear — including a huge view camera and scores of photographic plates — to sacred sites around the world? For more than 30 years Mr. Izu has been on a pilgrimage of sorts, taking exquisitely classic landscapes and portraits of sacred places and the faithful.

At first, he was interested only in pictures of grand temples, pyramids and holy sites.

But then he had a revelation.

“Before, I was just attracted to form,” Mr. Izu said. “In the last 10 years, I am more interested in the humans who go into these structures. That is where the spirit is. Without the people who pray or offer flowers, it’s just a structure.”

A selection of platinum prints from his trips to India opened Wednesday night at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan. Titled “ Where Prayer Echoes,” the prints include landscapes and portraits of people who follow various religions, from Hinduism and Islam to Sikhism and Jainism.

Mr. Greenberg has championed Mr. Izu’s work since he first saw it in 1980 and made him “the first living photographer” Mr. Greenberg exhibited at his original gallery soon after.

“They were just unusually beautiful pictures,” Mr. Greenberg said. “I fell for it.”

Befitting images that evoke ancient traditions, his images are produced using a view camera from which he makes contact prints. When he first started visiting sacred sites in Egypt, he used a 4-by-5 camera. But he wanted bigger images — for reasons that had as much to do with the pictures’ emotional impact as their technical aspects.

“These places have a special atmosphere,” he said. “I can sense it. I can feel it unlike normal structures. There is some kind of dense air, that I want to capture it.”

By the mid-1980s, he settled on his 14-by-20 camera. It had to do with the air.

“With a contact print, there is nothing between the negative and the paper,” Mr.Izu said. “With an enlargement, there is air in between, and I felt that was a dilution of the air. Of course, you capture the image at the site, in Egypt or India, and a lot of it is registered in the negative. I wanted to have the most direct way of making the image from the negative.”

He had been happy to travel the world — from Africa and Asia to Europe and Latin America — taking hundreds of images of sacred places. During his first trip to India, in 1996, he got a hint of how faith played out in daily life — whether among schoolchildren stopping in a temple to make a quick offering in the morning or a family cremating a loved one.

“On my first trip I got permission from a family to go to the ceremony,” he said. “My shock was they were not weeping or depressed. They were just taking that death and cremation as daily life. The family was even joking sometimes. I asked why. They said he had a good time in life, so they were teasing him when he was half-burned and they were sitting by, watching the cremation.”

Another experience nine years later in India changed how — and what — he shot. He was at a temple he had often photographed, Mr. Izu said, when he noticed how the faithful often left the sanctuary to bathe on the beach outside. In all the times he had gone there, he had not documented those rituals followed by thousands of pilgrims.

“I had just photographed the temple from all angles from inside and outside,” he said. “But without the people, it was just a shell. If you build a temple it does not have to be majestic. You can build a house, but once people come in and make an altar and start to pray, then it becomes a temple or church.”

Ever since, he has focused on people — and not just behind the camera. Grateful for all the images he had taken in Cambodia, he founded the Angkor Hospital for Children, which offers a variety of programs and services to communities near the temples he photographed. Modest to a fault, he did not even mention that work during a recent interview.

Mr. Izu says he is not a particularly religious person — although he was raised with Buddhist traditions in Japan — but he does wonder.

“My constant interest and probably my ultimate goal is to find out why people exist,” he said. “Do we need religion? Do we need a god? In the course of living a life, people rely on their own god. It is something above us, though not necessarily a religion.”

To plumb those questions, he now plans to revisit some of the sites from his earliest work, to look at the souls who flock to these ancient, grand structures.

“I have been going to these sacred places so many years, why was I deceived by superficial forms?” Mr. Izu said. “I didn’t even think about having people. Now I am almost like a portrait photographer. All those years, I missed it while going after impressive buildings. Now, I point my camera at the old man on the street. I can feel in my gut what I was missing all these years.”

Correction, Jan. 10, 2013: An earlier version of this slideshow misidentified the site of Slide 1. It is in the state of Punjab, not Himachal Pradesh. In Slides 13 and 16, Gaumokh is in Uttarakhand, also not Himachal Pradesh.