Beauty is in disrepute; “Impermanence” (Veritas Editions, 324 pages, $135) by Kenro Izo, restores it to our souls. Mr. Izu, now 73, uses an enormous view camera, a 14 x 20-inch Deardorff, to take very long exposures in dim light; this produces black-and-white images of exquisite detail. He shoots classic subjects like nudes, portraits and flowers but more frequently sacred places (rock cairns, stupas, churches, holy rivers) in France, Wales, Chile, Egypt, Cambodia, Bhutan, India and China. His closeups of statues of divinities at Angkor Wat reveal the deterioration that time effects on stone; other pictures show nature reclaiming its primacy, overgrowing what man has built and abandoned. He accords respect to the dead and the dying, transmuting impermanence into the timeless and the enduring.
Igor Posner’s “Cargó” (Red Hook Editions, 160 pages, $60) is a Rorschach test; viewers will react to it idiosyncratically and reveal themselves. The photographer himself says, in a brief endnote, “I am not sure if I know what this is fully about.” But part of it, certainly, is his experience as an immigrant from Russia to the United States. The pictures in this phantasmagoria of dislocation are variously black-and-white or in color, out-of-focus or sharply detailed, shot in America or maybe in Russia (there are no captions), and arranged one or several to a spread. There are beach scenes, interiors, alluring women, grizzled old men, nostalgia, glamour, disgust and vertigo as Mr. Posner struggles to establish himself.