Monographs & Art Books / I

Graciela Iturbide has found her inner theme photographing the Zapotec women of Juchitan and the Mixtec goat butchers of Oaxaca, in the company of Nobel laureates and world-renowned artists, among mourners at Mexican cemeteries and Indian death houses. Each image stands on its artistic own, but each also tells something about the fascinating artist who made it. In Eyes to Fly With, which includes both iconic images and previously unpublished work, Graciela Iturbide has assembled both a retrospective of her career and an introspective self-portrait—in short, an artist's art book.

Since 1975, Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) has been esteemed as one of Latin America's most important photographers. In 2008 she won the Hasselblad Award, the world's most prestigious prize in the field of photography. Accompanying a 2012 exhibition at the Museo Amparo en Puebla in 2012, for which the photographer made an exhaustive trawl of her archive, this beautifully printed volume juxtaposes a trove of previously unpublished photographs with reproductions of contact sheets of some of Iturbide's best-known images. The book is accordingly divided into two sections separated by a double binding. The first groups her works into four themes that have endured in her work from the very beginning--children, rituals, urban spaces and gardens. The second section is comprised of the contact sheets of her well-known Oaxaca, Birds and L.A. series.

Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) is Latin America's most internationally admired photographer, as her receipt of the 2008 Hasselblad Foundation award confirmed. Although she is best known for her serial portrayals of her native Mexico, one of Iturbide's most popular individual photographs is "Perros Perdidos" (or "Lost Dogs" ), an image of several dogs in silhouette on a rocky outcrop taken in India in 1998. Graciela Iturbide: No Hay Nadie/There Is No-Onereveals the Mexican photographer's extended explorations in (mostly) cities in the north of India--Varanasi, Delhi and Calcutta, as well as Bombay--over the past 13 years. Iturbide's black-and-white images are strikingly at ease with their subject matter, able to locate arrangements of objects, architectural outline and urban signage without ever lapsing into visual tourism.

207Kenro Izu has spent much of his career traveling the world, seeking the sacred and spiritual in landscapes and the people who inhabit them, and attempting to capture the moments in which he senses these qualities are revealed. The photographs in Bhutan: The Sacred Within reflect Izu's exploration of a country that he visited repeatedly over a period of six years (2002-2007) and in which he found a wealth of spiritual value. The people of Bhutan are heirs to an unbroken tradition of Buddhist government and religion. The kingdom is known for its measurement of national success, not in terms of the Gross National Product but rather in the Gross National Happiness of its people, a concept based on the Buddhist idea that happiness is an individual and inner pursuit. The Bhutanese government sees it as its responsibility to create the right environment for its citizens to seek happiness. Combining an artist's vision with exquisite sensitivity to the historical craft of photography, Izu creates work that brings us closer to a country on the brink of modernity that seeks to maintain its traditions.

207Kenro Izu's (born 1949) Eternal Light is a record of Indian spirituality. In Varanasi, known as the Indian 'City of Light,' Izu photographed festivals, rituals and cremations as well as portraying individual experiences of joy and suffering related to death and the afterlife. In Allahabad, where the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers meet, Izu attended the festival of Kumbh Mela, and in the city of Vrindavan, he photographed among the thousands of temples dedicated to Krishna.

Highly attuned to the emotions of his subjects, Izu's exquisitely rendered black-and-white photographs are intended to convey dignity and hope. He has stated: "It's as though the Hindu gods have suggested that I think about the question, where are people heading, in this life and after?" Through these photographs Izu strives to find the answers.

207Timeless, limitless 14 x 20 inch images of one of the world's most mystical places, accompanied by the poetry of Helen Ibbitson Jessup. Like the makers of the sacred image of Buddha, who utter three prayers for each stroke of the carving tool, Kenro Izu considers the act of picturemaking a type of divine practice, capturing essence and light. After making numerous trips to Angkor Wat, Izu, who was deeply moved by his encounters with the Cambodian children, decided to give something back to the country by creating a notforprofit organization, Friends Without A Border, dedicated to building and operating Angkor Hospital for Children. All proceeds from this book go to the hospital.

207Born in Osaka, Japan in 1949, Kenro Izu moved to New York City in the early 1970s, where he quickly established himself as a master of still life photography. A chance viewing of the mammoth plate photographs by the Victorian photographer Francis Frith led Izu to travel to Egypt in 1979, to photograph the pyramids and other sacred monuments. Thus began the artist s renowned series 'Sacred Places,' which includes work from holy sites in Syria, Jordan, England, Scotland, Mexico, Easter Island and, more recently, Buddhist and Hindu sites in India, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. Using a custom-made, 300-pound camera, Izu creates negatives that are 14 inches high by 20 inches wide. The resulting platinum palladium prints are widely recognized as being among the most beautiful prints in the history of the medium. To celebrate the thirtieth year of the ongoing 'Sacred Places' series, we are proud to present Kenro Izu's Thirty Year Retrospective, a stunning collection of the artist s most powerful work to date. This gorgeous new monograph comprises some 100 plates, beautifully printed in duotone on matt art paper and bound in Japanese cloth.

207In 79 AD, the city of Pompeii in the south of Italy was destroyed, buried beneath volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. At the time of its destruction, the population of Pompeii was estimated at 11,000 people. After the eruption, the city was lost for about 1,500 years until its rediscovery in the late 16th century. The objects that lay beneath the city had been preserved for centuries due to the lack of air and moisture. During the excavation, plaster was used to fill the voids in the compacted layers of ash that once held human bodies, enabling archaeologists to see the exact position a person was in at the moment of death. The original casts are kept in an archive within the Pompeii site and because of their sacredness and fragility, it is prohibited to move them to other locations. Second generation copies of the casts have since been made, and are loaned out to museums for exhibitions, both locally and internationally, but no individuals are allowed to borrow them. With the support of the Ambassador of Japan in Rome, the authority of Pompeii graciously made an exception, and granted permission for Kenro Izu to remove a selection of the copied casts in order to create photographic compositions at the Pompeii sites. In addition, the Pompeii authority has permitted Izu to photograph the original human casts in the archive building as 'portraits' of the people of ancient Pompeii. For the work of Requiem, Kenro Izu created an imaginary scene of sometime after 'the day', when lives were extinguished by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but among the scattered dead, plants have started to grow once again. This huge volcanic eruption, almost two millennia ago, is as if a nuclear explosion were to happen today. This thought makes one fearful of such a possibility taking place, anytime now, to us. Requiem is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5x7 inch original print that has been signed by the artist.

207When Kenro Izu is taking photographs, he finds himself constantly challenged by a seductive voice urging him to make a "nice picture." And Izu's photographs are gorgeous-the artist, inspired by 19th-century photography methods, has been working with a large-format camera since 1983, making detailed, lustrous contact prints on hand-coated platinum palladium paper. A master technician, Izu is considered one of the greatest living platinum printers. But taking "nice pictures" is not what Izu sets out to do.

The photographer aims instead to capture something of the spirit or inner life of his chosen subject-whether it be a still life or an ancient, sacred monument. Izu describes this tension between capturing the essence and beauty of the subject as an "effort to hold myself at the very edge (before falling into the dark hole of seduction)."

Kenro Izu: Seduction presents the results of these efforts: photographs by Izu of fruits, plants and human figures, all made with a large-format film camera and contact printed in platinum from 8x10 to 14x20-inch negatives.

Japanese-born, US-based photographer Kenro Izu (born 1949) studied at Nippon University in Tokyo before deciding to settle in New York. In 1979 he began what has become a lifelong project, traveling to photograph the world's sacred places. His journeys to Angkor Wat led him to establish a free pediatric hospital in Cambodia and found Friends Without a Border, a nonprofit organization to help Asian children.

207The images of the Japanese photographer accompany the reader on a fascinating trip around the world through the most important religious centers. The sophisticated art of Kenro Izu (Osaka, 1949) is the focal point of a volume devoted entirely to the photographer's long exploration of the world's most important holy places, from Cambodia, India, and Tibet to Indonesia, Egypt, and Syria. Fascinated by the sublime beauty of ancient remains, he returns to the styles and printing techniques of 19th-century photography, as they are best able to capture the mystical atmosphere of the places examined.