Yumiko Izu was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1968. She graduated from the Brooks Institute of Photography in California in 1998 and began her career as a photographer in New York. Her work is acclaimed for its serene, poetic quality, exploring the fragility and transience of life through large-format cameras and traditional techniques such as platinum palladium printing.
Since 2003, she has developed the ongoing Secret Garden series, juxtaposing the radiance of life with its inevitable end through the opposing tones of “Blanc” (white) and “Noir” (black). In 2016, she published the photobook Resonance, featuring works from Secret Garden and Faraway. Beginning in 2017, she created the Icarus series—abstract images of bird nests and feathers exploring fragility and renewal—exhibited in Tokyo, Taipei, Bangkok, Santa Fe, and Paris. In 2020, she released Saul Leiter: In Stillness, a photobook capturing the atelier of photographer Saul Leiter, accompanied by an exhibition at BOOKMARC in Tokyo.
Her recent activities include participation in Saul Leiter: The Library (Morioka Shoten at Shibuya Hikarie, 2023); the solo exhibition Utsuroi in Antwerp, Belgium (2024); the solo exhibition Kotonoha in Tokyo (2025); Utsuroi in New York (2025); and the two-person exhibition Visual Poetry from Ishikawa at the Japanese Garden in Belgium (2025).
In 2007, she received the Woodstock Center for Photography Fellowship in New York, and her works entered the collection of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. She has since presented numerous exhibitions across the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2021, she relocated from New York to Kanazawa, Japan, where she continues her artistic practice.
Portrait of the artist by Eliot Pan, 2023
