Kenro 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 traditions. Bhutan: The Sacred Within is published to coincide with Izu?s solo exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York.

Bhutan: The Sacred Within

Signed by the Photographer   "To us Japanese, issues concerning 'the emperor' are not solely matters of politics and history, but are also deeply, if subtly, connected to our everyday lives and spirit . . . How many people have gone to Hachioji, just outside of Tokyo, to visit the Musashino Imperial Mausoleum where the Showa Emperor is buried? How many people know what kind of scene has been created there? I too, of course, watched the broadcast of the imperial funeral, but I have never actually been to the mausoleum."  from the Introduction by Ryuichi Kaneko. In Emperor of Japan, Eiji Ina presents photographs of the misasagi, or burial mounds, of all 124 Japanese emperors since the Kofun period, reaching back some 1,600 years. The scenes that Ina has captured 'not of the tombs themselves, but rather the places for worshipping at the tombs, and the surrounding gardens and landscapes' were created by the emperor system, with its claim of an unbroken line of sovereigns, that served as the foundation of the modern nation state of Japan. Our second monograph on the work of Eiji Ina, Emperor of Japan is printed in an oversized format on matt art paper, bound in Japanese cloth and limited to 1,000 casebound copies.   ISBN: 978-1-59005-245-7   Hardcover, 12 x 15,    132 pages, 145 duotone plates.

Emperor of Japan

Signed by the Photographer   For nine years Japanese photographer Eiji Ina has been photographing his country's industrial waste sites. In images immediately accessible from their sheer abstract beauty, Ina draws the viewer into a deep meditation on the nature of resource, survival, and consumption.    Waste is limited to 1,000 copies in its first edition.    Nazraeli Press, 1998.    72 pp., 40 four-color illustrations,    12x12".    ISBN: 3923922655

Waste

Signed and Numbered with an original print tipped in   Nazraeli One Picture Book   In the 72 reproductions that make up "Wacht", Japanese artist Eiji Ina documents in details the omnipresence of security cameras around the world. This is a book of anomalies, as the cameras that simultaneously protect and monitor us vary from humorous and ominous, subtle to clunky, hi-tech to classical.   ISBN: 978-1-59005-285-3   Hardcover, 5 1/2 x 7 1/4,   16 pages,72 four colour plates,   Signed and numbered   1 original print.

(OPB#062) Wacht (OPB)

limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5 x 7 inch original print that has been signed by the artist.   In 79 AD, the city of Pompeii in the south of Italy was destroyed, buried beneath volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. At the time of its destruction, the population of Pompeii was estimated at 11,000 people. After the eruption, the city was lost for about 1,500 years until its rediscovery in the late 16th century. The objects that lay beneath the city had been preserved for centuries due to the lack of air and moisture. During the excavation, plaster was used to fill the voids in the compacted layers of ash that once held human bodies, enabling archaeologists to see the exact position a person was in at the moment of death.   The original casts are kept in an archive within the Pompeii site and because of their sacredness and fragility, it is prohibited to move them to other locations. Second generation copies of the casts have since been made, and are loaned out to museums for exhibitions, both locally and internationally, but no individuals are allowed to borrow them.   With the support of the Ambassador of Japan in Rome, the authority of Pompeii graciously made an exception, and granted permission for Kenro Izu to remove a selection of the copied casts in order to create photographic compositions at the Pompeii sites. In addition, the Pompeii authority has permitted Izu to photograph the original human casts in the archive building as ?portraits? of the people of ancient Pompeii. For the work of Requiem, Kenro Izu created an imaginary scene of sometime after ?the day?, when lives were extinguished by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but among the scattered dead, plants have started to grow once again.   This huge volcanic eruption, almost two millennia ago, is as if a nuclear explosion were to happen today. This thought makes one fearful of such a possibility taking place, anytime now, to us.   Requiem is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5x7 inch original print that has been signed by the artist.   ISBN: 978-1-59005-530-4   Hardcover, 6 x 8 1/2,    16 pages, 14 duotone plates,   1 original signed photograph.

(OPB2 015) Kenro Izu - Reqiuim

“I first met Mr. Ma in November 2016. Fifteen years prior, he had learned that a part of his beloved hometown of Fuzhou in Jiangxi Province would soon be immersed beneath the rising water of a newly built dam. Ming and Qing dynasty-era stone mansions and the thousand-year-old trees surrounding them would be submerged forever. His response to this was extraordinary.” — Kenro Izu\n\nMadong Ma’s heroic efforts to save parts of his hometown from flooding included physically disassembling, transporting and rebuilding many of the structures, along with some 10,000 trees, to a resort hundreds of miles away that he was constructing for this very purpose.\n\nKenro Izu undertook to photograph the remaining majestic houses and other traditional structures of the ancient village for posterity. Some of the homes were still inhabited by people who had grown up there, and who wanted to live and die where their ancestors had done so. Many of the homes still had altars to these ancestors; in others, the altars had been replaced by old posters of Chairman Mao. Still others were decorated with photographs of Lenin or Marx, the iconic images of the Cultural Revolution days, aging together with the buildings themselves. Fuzhou had become symbolic place, giving trace reminders of the life of people before the dam was built.\n\nThe resulting book serves as a reminder that many places on Earth could serve as bridges to our past; but often instead are simply been obliterated in the interest of land development. Abandoned villages, ruined houses, and the last remaining residents – these are the monuments of humankind.\n\nLimited to only 1,000 copies, this remarkable monograph comprises seventy one photographs by Kenro Izu, beautiful printed on matte art paper and bound in dark green linen. The book and accompanying text inset, with essays in Chinese, Japanese and English by the artist and Mr. Madong Ma, are housed in a custom wooden and board slipcase.\n\nISBN: 978-1-59005-542-7\nHardcover, cloth cover in a laminated wooden slipcase, 8.5 x 11 inches, 90 pages, 71 plates.

Books By Authours with Surnames starting with: i