In his photographs Yasuhiro Ishimoto (Japanese, born United States, 1921–2012) combined a spare, elegant style with techniques learned at the Institute of Design (ID) to depict people and the built environment in both Chicago and Japan. Born in San Francisco and raised in Japan, Ishimoto returned to the United States to study agriculture, but he was detained at the Amachi Internment Camp during World War II. In 1945 he moved to Chicago to study architecture and began photographing independently. After reading László Moholy-Nagy’s book Vision in Motion, Ishimoto enrolled at the ID in 1948, where he studied photography under Harry Callahan; he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1952. He returned to Japan in 1953, taking pictures and publishing two important books in subsequent years, Someday, Somewhere (1958) and Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960).[1] The first of these books featured scenes of Chicago and Tokyo, while in the second he focused on the seventeenth-century imperial Japanese villa as an example of proto-modern architecture. Ishimoto came back to Chicago in 1959 on a two-year fellowship before returning to Japan permanently. There he continued to photograph, publish in books and magazines, and exhibit; he was named a Person of Cultural Merit by the government of Japan in 1997.

Hugh Edwards mounted a one-person exhibition of Ishimoto’s work in the fall of 1960, acquiring ten photographs that year and adding more to the collection throughout the 1960s. The show, with sixty-five works on view, included many that had been made on Ishimoto’s recent return to Chicago, as well as scenes from Tokyo and Katsura. The accompanying brochure included a lengthy text by Minor White, who noted that Ishimoto “loves, respects, delights, is at home with the little things—as if he thought, in company with his ancestors, that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm.”[2] Edwards gave the young artist his enthusiastic support. In May 1960 he told Ishimoto how much he had enjoyed his book Someday, Somewhere: “How you put the painters and writers to shame and prove the camera is the only medium capable of catching the absurdity and pathos of these times in which we live!”[3]

[1] Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Someday, Somewhere (Aru hi, aru tikoro) (Geibi Shuppansha, 1958); Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Walter Gropius, and Kenzo Tange, Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (Yale University Press, 1960).

[2] Minor White, Photographs by Yasuhiro Ishimoto, exh. brochure (Art Institute of Chicago, 1960).

[3] Edwards to Yasuhiro Ishimoto, May 3, 1960, on file in the Photography Department, Art Institute of Chicago.