The Sacred & the Profound

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An influential mid-20th-century historian and critic of architecture, Siegfried Gideon, speculates in one of his books that religion developed originally as a response to certain uncanny sites. Primitive men, he argues, felt a sense of awe in the presence of particular caves, or glens, or springs, or mountaintops, and came to regard these places as sacred. Their responses to these sacred spaces were elaborated into ceremonies, ritual dance, music, and art, and into the whole panoply of religious expression. Kenro Izu (born 1949, Osaka, Japan) has made his career as a photographer by traveling from New York City, where he has lived since 1970, to various sacred sites and trying to capture their essence on film. The Rubin Museum of Art is currently exhibiting his latest effort, “Bhutan, the Sacred Within: Photographs by Kenro Izu.”

Bhutan is a tiny country in a mighty mountain range; it sits high up in the Himalayas, squeezed between India and China, and comparatively insulated from the modern world. The 700,000 Bhutanese are ruled by a king whose government measures its success in terms of Gross National Happiness. Mr. Izu visited Bhutan several times between 2002 and 2007, and brought with him his custom-built camera that accommodates specially made film in 14-inch-by-20-inch negatives. The camera weighs 300 pounds, so hauling it anywhere is a chore, but getting it up and down the Bhutanese mountains is a noteworthy logistical feat. Nevertheless, Mr. Izo is the sort of photographer for whom no effort is extravagant if it will allow him to get exactly the image he wants.

Mr. Izu’s photographs of Bhutan are disarmingly beautiful. The large negatives allow for contact prints rich in detail and subtle gradations of tone, characteristics that are enhanced by being platinum/palladium prints on watercolor paper. Some images are enlarged to a 36-inch-by-52-inch size as carbon pigment prints on rag paper, a process that maintains the delicacy of the contact prints. His subjects are mountains, monasteries, ritual performances, and deeply moving portraits of the people — portraits in which Mr. Izu tries to capture his subjects’ immersion in the realm of the sacred.

“Druk #1, Mt. Jomolhari, Jagothang, Bhutan” (2002), a picture of the country’s most sacred mountain, is one of the large carbon pigment prints. The brightly lit, snow-covered mountaintop is seen between the silhouettes of two other mountains. The outline of a monastery also projects up from between the mountains in the foreground. The image might be one of Ansel Adams’ except that everything in an Ansel Adams picture is sharp and, although Mr. Izu used a small aperture to be sure the details of the mountain would be in focus, he used a long exposure; as a result, the moving clouds behind the mountain blur into a streak. Whereas a short exposure freezes all motion into a specific instant of time, the indistinct trailing clouds behind Mt. Jomolhari suggest its relationship with eternity.

Mr. Izu also had his camera lugged up sheer mountain trails so he could capture monasteries perched precariously on vertical rock walls high above the mist and clouds. These seemingly inaccessible structures testify to the determination of their builders to dwell apart from lay society and mundane nature, and to make homes for themselves in close spiritual communities. The photographs echo Chinese and Japanese drawings of similar subjects.

“Druk #545, Jambay Lhakhang, Bumthang, Bhutan” (2007) is another of the large carbon pigment prints, and shows a teenage girl at prayer. She sits cross-legged on a wooden floor, wearing a simple gown with a more elaborate shawl draped around her neck, her hands holding a strand of ritual beads and pressed together in a familiar attitude of prayer. Her face is beautiful, but what distinguishes it is the look of inward intensity, the sense that this person is in touch with a reality the camera cannot record directly, but only hint at by way of reflection.

All of Mr. Izu’s painstaking techniques work to enrich this image. The large negative records the grain of the wooden floor, the texture of the gown and the design of the shawl, the light reflected from the irises of the girl’s eyes, and — most important — the modeling of her face, so that her cheeks and forehead and lips and nose and philtrum are each clearly present. Also, of course, Mr. Izu’s patience in giving a subject not used to posing for a camera time to be comfortable, time to forget him and to forget herself.

The subject of “Druk #3446, A girl in a buckwheat field, Prakhar, Bhutan” (2006) is a bit younger and stares at the camera. Although not as obviously spiritual, she stands amid the buckwheat as if she, too, were a product of the soil. The buckwheat comes over her waist, and seems her natural element. Mr. Izu’s delicacy here is itself a type of witness.

There are sensitive portraits of actors, dancers, and deities. “Druk #323, Paro Dzong Paro, Bhutan” (2006) is a picture of a man in a mask. Against an indistinct background, he stands in a full-length gown with his right hand lifted in a simple gesture. The mask fits over his head and is not especially fantastic; it has a moustache and somewhat comical expression. In Mr. Izu’s image, the mask also has a distinct personality, a personality that inhabits the actor as much as the actor inhabits it.

Besides their current presentation at the Rubin Museum of Art, Mr. Izu’s pictures from Bhutan will be at the Howard Greenberg Gallery beginning December 14.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until February 18 (150 W. 17th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-620-5000).


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