The iris image pickup apparatus includes a recess sinking in the direction of a sight line of a person to be authenticated, the recess provided on an outer panel covering the image pickup unit for picking up the iris image of a person, indicators arranged at the bottom of the recess, external indicators arranged on the periphery of the recess, and a controller for performing lighting control of the indicator as well as keeping the external indicators off in a period where the image pickup timing of the image pickup unit is overlapped. Since the external indicators are kept off during picking up the image, the sight line of a person to be authenticated does not move to the external indicators thus picking up an iris image without blurs.