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 In Eyes to Fly With, which includes both iconic images and previously unpublished work, Graciela Iturbide has assembled both a retrospective of her career and an introspective self-portrait—in short, an artist's art book.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photographer made an exhaustive trawl of her archive, this beautifully printed volume juxtaposes a trove of previously unpublished photographs with reproductions of contact sheets of some of Iturbide's best-known images.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.

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.