Photography of Kenro Izu

Photography of Kenro Izu

Kenro Izu was born in Osaka, Japan in 1949. He studied at Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo before moving to America in 1972. He spent two years working as a photo assisstant in New York City and then proceeded to establish his own studio, specializing in still life photography. Since 1979, in addition to his well established comercial work, Kenro began his serious professional commitment to his fine art photography, travelling the world to capture the sacred ancient stone monuments in their natural settings.

In 1983, Kenro Izu commissioned Jack Deardorf to build him a 14x20 inch view camera, at which point he began his "Still Life" series. His “Still Life” series mostly captured the beauty of flowers. However, he later moved on to nude photography. Kenro wanted to capture the essence of beauty found with the human body. He later started to take intimate pictures of the human body that expressed such feeling. Even did a shoot where his models were casted in blue lighting.

Finally, Kenro started to travel the world in order to capture spiritual landscapes. Inspired by 19th-century photography, Izu's contact-prints of 8x10, 11x14 and 14x20 inch negatives on hand-coated Platinum-Palladium paper are technically unsurpassed. The result is a warm, lustrous, highly detailed print with superior archival qualities. Over the years, Izu has traveled and documented Egypt, Syria, Jordan, England, Scotland, Mexico, France and Easter Island (Chile). Most recently, he focused on Buddhism and Hindu monuments in South East Asia: Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia, Veitnam and India. Through them, he captures profound beauty immersed in natural states of decay. These images later became part of his “Sacred Places” series. Kenro Izu began making photographs of difficult-to-reach places. Invariably, for want of a better description, these were places that were possessed of "spirituality." As a child Kenro wanted to see the Seven Wonders of the World. Even...