KENRO IZU BIOGRAPHY

Kenro Izu produces astonishingly beautiful, spiritually compelling images of some of the most revered religious monuments set in the natural world—from Asia to Egypt to Europe. He is widely considered one of the greatest photographers working in the world today.

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1949, Kenro Izu moved to New York City in the early 1970s. After discovering the mammoth plate photographs of Egypt by the British Victorian photographer Francis Frith, he traveled to Egypt in 1979 to photograph the pyramids and other sacred monuments. Izu has since photographed holy sites in Syria, Jordan, England, Scotland, Mexico, and Easter Island and has most recently focused his energies on Buddhist and Hindu sites in India, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, and China.

Through his unique technique, Kenro Izu succeeds in capturing the spiritual essence of the places he photographs. Using a custom-made, 300-pound camera, he creates negatives that are fourteen inches highby twenty inches wide. The artist meticulously pores over every image to remove visual elements he believes are unnecessary. During a three-day process, the negatives are printed into positive images on hand-coated archival paper. The resulting platinum palladium prints “are among the most finely crafted prints ever made in the history of the photographic medium,” says consulting curator for the photography collection Clark Worswick.

(biography from the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts)

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