PROFILE
Yumiko Izu studied at the Visual Arts School in Osaka, Japan where she was originally from. After moving to the United States, she studied at the Brooks Institute of Photography in California, where she received a B.A. degree.

In 1998 she moved to New York City and started working on various assignments in advertising and editorial photography. In 2003 she began her professional career in fine arts photography, using the platinum-palladium printing process. She also started producing large scale pigment prints in 2008.

Yumiko is a recipient of the 2007 Photographers' Fellowship from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Yumiko currently lives in Rhinebeck, NY and works out of her studio in Red Hook, NY.

REVIEW
BROAD STREET REVIEW- August 19, 2008 by Robert Zaller
Flowers as sculpture in motion
Yumiko Izu, wife of the well-known photographer of Angkor Wat, Kenro Izu, is a rapidly emerging artist in her own right, as a small but exquisite show at Galerie BMG in Woodstock, N.Y., makes clear. Ms. Izu specializes in photographing flowers, a well-worn subject that yields fresh and striking results in her hands. Her photographs are taken in black and white, with a mounted, oversize 8 x 10 camera, and exposures of up to a minute. She uses the older platinum-palladium process, and prints on fine, textured paper, enabling her to achieve extraordinary textural effects.

The present show consists of two suites, the first and earlier in black and white, and the second printed entirely in shades of white. The former, with its stark contrast and its subtle gradations of gray, is the more immediately appealing. Some of the images are boldly sensual; others suggest a mysterious, nocturnal state of being, tinged with decay.

Flowers flourish differently than anything else in nature; they die differently as well. Ms. Izu, in these images, runs a gamut between both extremes, reminding us as well of the human relationship to the floral world, for we make flowers the companion of our most intimate hours, and of our deepest joys and sorrows. They personify us, and we them; and yet they are full of strangeness, and when seen with a poet's eye such as Ms. Izu's, they can genuinely startle us. D. H. Lawrence understood flowers this way, and I think he would have enjoyed this exhibition.

It is Ms. Izu's white-on-white images, however, that made the finally more distinctive impression for me. Using roses and sweet pea, she achieves an extraordinary sense of scalloping; her petals, seemingly urged by an invisible wind, suggest sculpture in motion. One thinks of the flutings of ancient Greek statuary, but whereas the Greeks sought to mimic nature, Ms. Izu derives the most delicate of artifacts from actual leaves.

It's yet another way she negotiates the subtle bridge between the flower world and our own, and suggests the myriad subtle ways in which they reflect and comment on each other.

WOODSTOCK TIMES - August 14, 2008 by Paul Smart
Smart Art - The flower as metaphor
Yumiko Izu's flower images in her show Secret Garden at Galerie BMG this month are not only exquisite in their sense of tactile delicacy, but also quite astounding in their sense of "How'd-she-do-that" mastery of the rare craft of platinum palladium processing.

Platinum, unlike more modern forms of photo processing (and all of the newer digital formats), involves a careful, time-consuming painting process utilizing chemicals over paper. Fine in its standard uses, capturing rich blacks and deepening shades of grey; but something completely different when working in the white-on-white spectrum that characterizes about half of these new works.

Gallery owner Bernard Gerson smiles when we pause before those works, and relates how he'd wondered how they were created as well. "Drastic overexposure," he said of these central images in Secret Garden, as key an exploration of the ephemeral beauty of flowers, depicting them in various stages of their life cycle, as any book I've read on the matter, as lyrical as any poem.

"Everything in this world has its end and nothing remains unchanged," Izu, of Rhinebeck, writes of her work. "Flowers, petals, stems, pollens and ruins, they vanish out of the darkness slowly with a hint of sorrow, as if anticipating their fate. The flower's life is a metaphor that reflects on the fleetingness of human life."

NEW HAVEN ADVODATE - November 24, 2008 by Tom MacMillan
Sinister/Dexter
Georgia O'Keeffe brought us full-frontal flowers in vibrant color. Photographer Yumiko Izu does the opposite.

Izu's flowers are gray, and they emerge from darkness or curl out of the light, like evanescent wisps of smoke. Where O'Keeffe's were bursting with lush vitality, Izu's are drooping, and not long for this world. Their backs are turned to us, and they fold into themselves wearily.

Izu's flower photos are currently on display at the Jennifer Jane Gallery in Westville. It's the photographer's second show ever, and her first in Connecticut.

The exhibition comprises a collection of platinum palladium contact prints made using an 8 x 10 view camera, and a few enormous digital enlargements.

The gallery is divided into a dark left side and a light right side. The darker, sinister half, comprising images of flowers photographed against a black background, is the more elegiac of the two. Many of the images seems appropriate for this season. All around us plants seem to wither and die and the earth turns towards darkness. The flowers are in mourning, and their hide their faces from us, lost in funereal thoughts.

Over on the lighter, dexter side of the gallery, where the images were made against a white back drop, things feel a bit more cheery. This is the home of papery, cloud-like flowers, seemingly made of light. It's easy to think of them as the souls of our departed spring flowers, waiting in the spirit realm to be reborn in a few months.