Sacred Places

During the 1980s, Kenro Izu began focusing his lens on an intreaguing subject — difficult-to-reach, spiritual places. Mr. Izu's photography captures places of worship as diverse as Easter Island, Teotihuacán, Stonehenge, the monuments of the Chinese Silk Road and the caves of Ajanta in India.

His book, Sacred Places, follows the success of Still Life, his first book — and represents the first major compilation of these stunning travel images.

The strength of his work stems from the artist's careful scrutiny of the genre of the great 19th-century "exotic" photographs of Asia.

Such work ranged from locales such as the banks of the Nile and Cairo to the quayside of Yokohama. Like his 19th-century predecessors, Mr. Izu utilizes large-format cameras — typically a massive 14-by-20-inch view camera.

But Mr. Izu is also very much a 21st-century photographer. He borrows, reshapes and recasts the styles of the 19th century and modernism for his own unique imagery.

His vision is at all times a subtle and multi-layered creation — and it is comfortably outside of the ordinary photographic parameters of our time.

About Kenro Izu

Born in 1949 in Osaka, Japan, Kenro Izu studied photography at Nihon University, College of Art in Tokyo from 1969 to 1970.

He then moved to New York where he began working with the complex platinum/palladium process shortly after admiring a Paul Strand print at auction in 1981.

Today, Mr. Izu is considered one of the finest practitioners of this early photographic medium. His work is included in numerous major collections. Among them are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Mr. Izu is also the founder of Friends Without A Border — a foundation which provides medical care for children in Cambodia.