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PGI is proud to present Blue, the gallery’s second exhibition of works by Japanese photographer Kenro Izu.

     In 1971, at the age of 21, Kenro Izu left his native Japan in 1971 for the United States. In the forty years since, he has continued to create photographic works on the themes of faith and human dignity. During a visit to Egypt in 1979, Izu discovered his fascination with sacred places, buildings and artifacts that transcend our understanding of the world. His long career has involved traveling to more than thirty countries around the world, including Bhutan and India where he photographed people of faith seeking the sacred within the human.

     He began working with 14×20-inch large format photography in 1983. The rich detail of large format film and the deep tones of his finely crafted platinum prints allow him to capture and express the singular and sublime nature of his subjects.

Taken with great care and patience, Izu’s works stir our imagination and emotions with their unique sense of presence and time.

The works featured in PGI’s exhibition of Blue were originally shot in a studio in New York rather than at a sacred site. Body pursues presence through the gestures of a butoh dancer, and Still Life explores the beauty of still life motifs and wilting flowers. Both series owe their mesmerizing quality to the depth and beauty of shadows.

     Rereading Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, Izu was reminded of the importance of the shadow in the Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Having left Japan at an early age to pursue a career in photography, understanding the shadow as a source of beauty allowed Izu to rediscover his Japanese identity and provided the impetus to take his work in a new direction.

Izu created his Blue series between 2001 and 2004, a deliberate homage to Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period exactly one hundred years earlier. After creating platinum prints from the 14×20-inch negatives, Izu coated them with cyanotype sensitizer and exposed them to ultraviolet light several times. The resulting deep blue color, unique texture and rich detail complement the elegant, serene atmosphere of Izu’s Blue series.

     The exhibition consists of approximately 20 platinum-cyanotype prints.

My Blue series, inspired by Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, was created between 2001 and 2004, exactly one hundred years after Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period.

When I first read Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows as a student in Japan, it had little impact on me.  But years later, when a friend in the United States gave me the English translation, the text affected me profoundly. It was around that time that I began to understand the beauty of shadows, both in my work and in my life, and when I became more aware of my Japanese identity.

I bought and read the Japanese original once more, and in its pages I discovered fragments of the Japanese aesthetic.

Tanizaki wrote: ‘We Orientals, as I have suggested before, create a kind of beauty of the shadows we have made in out-of-the-way places. There is an old song that says “the brushwood we gather—stack it together, it makes a hut; pull it apart, a field once more.” Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.’

Late one night I woke up and went into the living room. The room, with its flower vase glowing blue in the moon’s light, felt different from the living room of the home I knew.

Its atmosphere resembled the inner sanctum of a Tibetan temple, where a golden Buddha emitted a faint light within thick darkness. I could feel the tension and sense the shadows of a sacred mountain that had received a thousand years of prayers.

In the moment when light and shadow forfeit their boundaries, even the surest presence dissolves into darkness, leaving behind only appearance.

Kenro Izu

English translation by Robert Zetzsche

[Related Exhibition]

Roonee 247 Fine Arts

Kenro Izu  Bhutan
       November 21 – December 10, 2023

Kenro Izu

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1949. After studying at Nihon University College of Arts, Tokyo, Kenro Izu moved to the United States. For more than thirty years, Izu has been photographing sacred places with 14×20-inch large format camera to create platinum print which render the subtle nuance and capturing the spirituality of the sacred place. In 2021, he returns to Japan and based in Kanazawa.

A visit to Angkor Wat in 1993 made Izu aware of the outstanding number of victimized children struggling with the consequences of Cambodia’s vast minefields. This awareness led Izu to establish a free hospital for children in Cambodia and Laos, and to found the nonprofit organization Friends Without A Border in 1996, that funds medical treatment and healthcare programs for disadvantaged children.

Izu’s works are collected by major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and many other museums around the United States. His works has been published in 18 books, including Seduction (2017), Eternal Light (2018), Requiem (2020), and Fuzhou -the forgotten land (2021), Impermanence (2022).