Kenro Izu was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1949. While studying art at the Nihon University in Tokyo, he visited New York and decided to settle there at the age of 21.
After establishing the Kenro Izu Studio in New York City in 1974, he began travelling the world in 1979, photographing Sacred Places – from the Egyptian desert, to the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam, the Himalayan mountains of Tibet, Bhutan and Ladakh, the remote island of Easter Island, and the rolling hills of England and Scotland. This project has been his life's work ever since. Using a custom-made 14×20-inch Deardorff view camera, Izu prints directly from the large-scale negative without an enlarger, creating contact platinum prints on hand-coated paper that capture the subtle nuances and spirituality of these sacred places.
From 2013 to 2016, he worked on a documentary project called Eternal Light, photographing people living on the fringes of Indian society with a medium-format film camera. From 2015 to 2017, he focused on the Pompeii Requiem project, portraying the city and people who vanished nearly two thousand years ago due to the volcanic eruption in Pompeii, Italy. From 2017 to 2019, he completed the project Fuzhou: A Forgotten Land in China. The Noh project was the first photographic project in Japan to capture the deep emotions absorbed by a 600-year-old Noh mask.
Kenro Izu has published twenty books, including Still Life (Arena Editions), Sacred Places (Arena Editions), Bhutan: Sacred Within (Nazraeli), Territories of Spirits (Skira), Seduction (Damiani), Eternal Light (Steidl), Requiem for Pompeii (Skira), and Impermanence (Varitas Edition). His latest book Mono no Aware; Beauty of Impermanence will be released in fall 2025 by Nazraeli Press.
Izu has received several awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
His photographs are held in the collections of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.
In addition to his photographic projects, Izu founded a not-for-profit organization called Friends Without a Border in New York and Tokyo, Japan, after witnessing the suffering of children due to poverty and the lack of a healthcare system in Cambodia during his photography trips there in 1993. Friends Without a Border founded the Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 1999. Since then, the AHC has treated over two million Cambodian children. In 2015, Kenro Izu and Friends Without a Border opened the Lao Friends Hospital for Children (LFHC) in Luang Prabang, Lao PDR, to provide free, compassionate medical care to children in Laos (https://www.fwab.org).
© 2025, Birgit Filzmaier