Author Description

From the publisher: "During the 1980s, 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." Izu made "documents" of places of worship as diverse as Easter Island, Teotihuacán, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, the monuments of the Chinese Silk Road, Palmyra, Mustang, Hampi, the caves of Ajanta, Borobudur, Pagan, and Lhasa. The work was painstakingly slow. Since creating those first images in the 1980s, Izu has continued his travels, making numerous journeys to these out-of-the-way places. Sacred Places, which follows the success of Still Life, Izu's first book with Arena Editions, represents the first major compilation of these magnificent travel images - images that truly defy simple description. Izu has single-handedly raised photography to a point that was lost somewhere in the nineteenth century. This work springs from the artist's careful scrutiny of the genre of the great nineteenth-century "exotic" photographs of Asia - the work that flourished from the banks of the Nile and Cairo to the quayside of Yokohama between 1859 and 1879."