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These superb palladium prints, of the inaccessible landscapes of which
legends have long been told, take their place in a more than 100-year-old
tradition of travelers' photography. But they use a radically different grammar
of technique and aesthetics. Against backgrounds of river valleys and the
heart-stopping elevations of Himalayan and other mountain ranges, the artist
directs us to weathered structures of archetypal profile whose outlines subsist
in the world's memory: pyramids at sunset, stone circles in moonlight,
dawn-lighted, snow-tipped peaks. Once these forms embodied complex religious and
philosophical ideas. Hindu and Buddhist images are still legible on a certain
level, but others exist in cultural oblivion. Most moving among these last are
the well-known Easter Island figures, on bedrock roots yearning toward
who-knows-what seas beyond their own.
Actually, Mr. Izu is a reverent and buddhistic humanist with layered memories
and ideas. He is exquisitely attentive to what he brings to his subjects and
what he wants to evoke from them. With masterly patience, he prepares and waits
in place to experience the ambience that he anticipates finding at a chosen
site. He trusts that what is literally intangible -- perhaps an aura of ancient
passersby and ceremonial enactments -- can be made accessible through the
tonalities, densities and illumination that he will, months later, cause to
appear in his prints.
I saw the prints at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., not long after
Sept. 11. I still had in mind that morning's news photos of smoking wreckage in
New York. Walking among these images of destroyed and abandoned temples, Buddha
heads in a stranglehold of vines, prayer sheets blown to lace in bone-dry air, I
thought I'd never seen images so melancholy. That day, it seemed unsurprising
that that vision came from an artist formed by boyhood visits to Hiroshima. (The
Peabody Essex show runs until Dec. 2 and another exhibition of Mr. Izu's work is
at Sepia International in Chelsea through Dec. 10.)
In fact, Mr. Izu was in Japan in September, waiting for a plane to New York
when he saw the World Trade Center destroyed on television. ''I felt I had
stones in my stomach,'' he told me during a recent visit to his studio in
Chelsea. ''I felt my own house was invaded. Destroyed.'' When I asked whether he
would photograph the New York site, he shook his head. ''In the World Trade
Center, I sense grief, sadness. It doesn't motivate me to photograph. I'm
praying for the spirits of the victims. I wouldn't photograph in Hiroshima. It's
a place where people only prayed 'never again.' ''
Kenro Izu, who is 52, was born in Osaka to a single mother and spent his
school years in Iwakuni, near Hiroshima. If a father's absence affected his
boyhood, so doubtless did the monuments, the human stories and the photographic
documentation of the atom-bombed city.
He first planned to become a doctor. But in high school he switched to
liberal arts and by college was studying photography. Shortly before graduation,
he visited New York and decided to stay. For the next two decades, he worked in
fashion and other commercial photography.
Artists, like travelers, reach turning points. ''When I was 29 and 10 months,
facing the Big 30, I was panicked,'' he said. ''I was thinking I had come to New
York to be a fine-art photographer, but at the time I was photographing jewelry.
When I questioned myself about what my personal work would be, the internal
reason for making art, I couldn't even say I was a photographer. I had to go
somewhere. So I went to Egypt. This was 1979.''
Mr. Izu gave himself three weeks to travel and photograph in that land of
monuments and desolation. When he returned, he spent a long time studying the
shots he had made. One print, he saw, stood out. ''It impressed me, myself,'' he
said. ''It was different from what I'd thought I was aiming at. And then things
came together.''
That image was of the famous stepped pyramid of Sakkara, the earliest of the
pyramids. Mr. Izu shot it from a distance, showing it looming against a dull
sky, which seems full of blown sand. The foreground is sand as well, drifting
almost to the photographer's feet and nearly engulfing a field of fallen walls.
The tones of the print have a remarkable pictorial unity. The ghostly pyramid
and its enveloping atmosphere merge into a single image not exactly textured but
almost palpable. The effect is uncanny. The image came by accident, but it
turned Mr. Izu around.
''The moment had come just before sunset,'' Mr. Izu recalled. ''I was making
a long exposure. Suddenly I couldn't believe what was happening in front of my
eyes. When I saw it later, the photograph was more than I expected. More than I
was capable of. It was beyond my ability to make.''
Since then, Mr. Izu has perfected his technique and method. He uses a
specially designed and constructed camera weighing 300 pounds to produce
14-by-20-inch negatives. With this burden of baggage, which he consigns to
porters or, in extremity, portages on his own back like a Hokusai traveler, he
takes off on his tremendous treks. ''The purpose of the 300-pound camera is to
capture the dense air surrounding the stone,'' he said. ''I didn't believe in it
until I started to use the big camera. Now I believe I am capturing it.
''I feel it in these sacred places: a certain tense atmosphere. In Japan, the
borders around shrines, between the sacred and human area, are clearly marked. A
shinto shrine is beyond the real world. The air of that area is beyond human.
When I was a child and passed a certain shrine, I felt the air grow tense. Now I
try to believe in my instinct.''
Mr. Izu documents what he brings to the site in his sensory imagination.
''That is what I want to capture: a sense of presence,'' he said. ''As if
someone or something were there.''
Clearly, Mr. Izu is engaged in a process of imaginative projection, a living
theater of illusion, if you will. ''I have to wait for the light,'' he said.
''Often I don't feel it until there's a change of wind, sun, rain, sunset,
sunrise, whatever. But eventually the atmosphere changes and I feel it. I want
to maintain that documentary principle. To accept what is. To unite my self with
it.''
Listening to Mr. Izu describe his pursuit of ''air'' and ''presence'' in dead
monuments, I recalled how New York had seemed to change after the World Trade
Center disaster. The very stones of the city, its sidewalks and walls, its
terrifying dark canyons between buildings, were putting forth candlelight and
scrawls of poetry. I, who rarely do, used the word ''mystical'' to describe the
sight.
Yet it's no mystery. From ancient times, people have engaged in collective
rituals of regeneration by building artful bulwarks against fear. Some street
and performance artists tap into these feelings, too.
''I feel protected in sacred places,'' Mr. Izu said. ''I try to harmonize
with the people who have been there. Their presences. Their prayers. I don't do
the prayers. But I try to accept what is there.''
The arts don't work prayerful magic, stop time or raise up fallen walls, but
individual artists can reanimate the stones. Reason enough, again, to harbor the
living arts in our time.
Several plates show details of the Borobodur, the great Buddhist temple
in Java, built in the ninth century, abandoned to the jungle, rediscovered in
the 19th century by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, reclaimed by foliage and decay
and finally reconstructed by Unesco. To climb and circumambulate its intricately
carved stepped platforms is to travel in theory from the realm of ordinary life
up through ever more rarefied levels of sculptural abstraction to the empty sky
where, by Buddhist teaching, all things must end.
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