‘Sacred Places’ to be shown UM Museum offers exhibit of Kenro Izu’s photographs

BANGOR – The University of Maine Museum of Art on Harlow Street will present the first comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States of the work of internationally acclaimed photographer Kenro Izu. The exhibition, April 14-July 1, was organized and is circulated by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

“Kenro Izu: Sacred Places” showcases an ensemble of more than 50 of Izu’s photographs of spiritual landmarks in Asia, the Pacific islands, Egypt and Europe, many never before exhibited.

Clark Worswick, curator of photography for the Peabody Essex Museum, said the Japanese-born photographer works in the tradition of both the great 19th century landscape photographers and early 20th century pictorialists.

“With Izu, you have a photographer who is working against the grain in contemporary photography in a classical form. I think he is one of the greatest photographers working in the world today,” Worswick said.

Among Izu’s most renowned images are those of the ancient Angkor temples in Cambodia. The photographs capture the Khmer architectural monuments and the natural landscape surrounding – and in some case destroying – them.

Izu’s photography of Angkor also brought him close to the suffering of Cambodian children whose limbs had been shattered by land mines. He helped establish a free-care hospital for those children and has supported it with proceeds from his photographs through an organization he set up called Friends without a Border.

Izu was born in Osaka in 1949 and attended the Nihon University College of Art before moving to New York City in the early 1970s. After discovering Francis Frith’s mammoth plate photographs of Egypt, he traveled there in 1979 to photograph the pyramids and other ancient monuments, and the Egyptian landscape. A practicing Buddhist, Izu has recently focused his energies on Buddhist and Hindu sites in India, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam and Indonesia. “Kenro Izu: Sacred Places” also includes photographs of hallowed monuments in Borobodur, Indonesia; Agra and Varanasi in India; and Mandalay, Myanmar.

“The important thing is the spirituality of these monuments,” he once told an interviewer. “It’s not just a photograph of a building. The building has to be there to photograph, but the atmosphere is what I’m interested in. The building is a representation of that spiritual side.”

All photographs are lent by The Lane Collection, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.

In addition to the Izu exhibit, the “81 Heads” exhibit draws from the museum’s permanent collection of more than 6,000 objects. Intended as a survey, the exhibition explores works by artists as diverse as German expressionist Max Beckmann and Fluxus master George Maciunas.

Portraits have long been the focus of artists, either as a means of learning to render from real life or as a commentary through expression and attitude. While photography is often identified closely with portraiture, as is evident in Todd Webb’s revealing portrait of the writer Bertolt Brecht, equally compelling is the loving charcoal portrait of Waldo Peirce’s mother.

“81 Heads” includes works by Berenice Abbott, Bernard Buffet, Chuck Close, Mimmo Paladino, Rockwell Kent, Henri Matisse, Ben Shahn, Kathe Kollwitz, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. The title of the exhibit provides the viewer with the number of heads in the exhibit, not necessarily the number of works.

Museum hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Admission is $3, with no charge for museum members, children under 6, and UM students with a Maine Card.