He concentrated on Yamatoji (historical sites of Nara Prefecture) and Buddhist statues.
They did product and advertising photography and sold photographic goods.
His house in Osaka was destroyed in a bombing of 1945, and he escaped to his family home in Nara.
Irie's photographs of Buddhist imagery were published as early as the early 1940s, and in 1958 he embarked on what would be a stream of books of such photographs, which had commercial success.
In April 1992, three months after Irie died, a museum largely devoted to his works was set up in Nara, the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography Nara City.