“His photographs are beautiful, but it’s not so much the beauty you see with your eyes that matters. It’s the fact that the beauty he captured with his camera wasn’t the same before. he doesn’t press the shutter and won’t be the same afterwards.This impermanence is the deepest beauty he seeks in his work.Eikoh Hosoe
Veritas Publishingthe first publishing house specializing in photographic art and storytelling on paper, is pleased to announce the publication of the Japanese master photographer Kenro Izuis the stunning new book Impermanence: The inner spirit, A fifty-year journey. Impermanence part of a “Trilogy of Masters”, also featuring George Tice THE WORK OF LIFEwhich was unveiled at AIPAD The Photography Show in May 2022, and that of Paul Caponigro Visual memories and hidden placesscheduled for release in September 2022.
For more than 50 years, master photographer Kenro Izu (b. 1949 in Osaka, Japan) has been creating images with his large format cinematic process. Impermanence represents fifty years of his work after leaving Japan for the United States as a young man to begin a career in fine art photography. Izu recalls “It was Thanksgiving night in 1971 when I arrived in Port Authority on a Greyhound bus. The illuminated Empire State Building on 34th Street shone through the fog. I was finally in New York, the city I dreamed of before leaving Japan.
Impermanence features images from Izu’s main series taken during his extensive travels to countries and locations around the world. Izu titles his book essay, “A Journey Without a Map”, and he recounts his process of becoming an artist guided by intuition. Meeting and talking with the 14th Dalai Lama was a pivotal moment in his sensitivity as an artist. This thoughtful recognition of the invisible in the visible lends an emotional quality to his photographic images.
“After the first years of experimentation, the direction of my work came to be guided not by logic, but by instinct. I let intuition guide me to each of the destinations and subjects I photographed. It has been so for nearly half a century. As the basso continuo can be heard throughout a piece of music, I hope those of you looking at the breadth of my career represented by the images in this book see the continuum – the spiritual bassline – in all my photographs.
This continuum of metaphorical and literal, figurative and symbolic, plays out through the pages, reflecting a reverence for light and story found in people as well as places. He finds parallels and points of exploration, echoing form and line in his botanical and nude studies. His “Sacred Places” highlight places around the world, from Egypt to Laos, from Pompeii to Bhutan. The book concludes with its most recent and ongoing series on Japanese Noh masks.
Eikoh Hosoe met Izu over 30 years ago, and in the introduction to the book he notes Izu’s unique artistic vision, writing, “It is a vision of beauty in all things, which he seeks often in the places where it is perhaps most fragile: a flower whose fullness lasts only for days, if not only for hours; an ancient Angkor temple, decaying and broken by the passage of time and half-consumed by the nature that surrounds it; death rituals on the banks of the Ganges in India. But its true purpose is not just what is seen through the camera lens or on a printed sheet of paper. It is a spiritual beauty that can only be experienced in a more abstract sense.
The design and physical elements of Kenro Izu’s fifty-year journey reflect the intent and aesthetic of Izu’s images. Presented as a cloth-bound hardcover with a cover available, the pages are printed in four-color offset lithography. The expansive 324 pages feature over 220 original platinum palladium scanned image plates and the negatives behind them. The limited edition version comes in a clamshell case with an original collotype handmade by Benrido Atelier in Kyoto, Japan.
Accompanying texts by Kenro Izu, internationally renowned photographic artist Eikoh Hosoe and gallerist Howard Greenberg, as well as descriptions of plates, are presented in three languages in English, Japanese and Chinese.
About the artist:
Kenro Izu is a very famous photographer. Born in Japan, he lived in the United States from 1971 to 2021 while photographing around the world. A bespoke Deardorff in a unique 14 x 20 inch format has been the hallmark of his work, and his photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums and published in twenty books. Additionally, he is the founder of a pediatric hospital and a non-profit organization, Friends Without A Border, for Cambodian children who suffer from lack of medical facilities and extreme poverty.
Impermanence: The inner spirit, A fifty-year journey
Veritas Publishing
Professional press edition:
ISBN: 978-0-9892099-9-1
Offset lithography, four-color printing
324 pages with 220 images
Trim size: 12 x 13 inches.
Custom fabric covered case available
Introductory price: US$125
Izu Limited Edition:
ISBN: 978-1-955565-00-4
Custom clamshell case
with an original collotype signed by Kenro, chosen from 4 different prints.
For pricing information, visit https://www.veritaseditions.com.