Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto (石元泰博) learned how to photograph in a concentration camp. During the Second World War, cameras were prohibited as contraband in most camps, but Japanese Americans at Amache, Colorado, were allowed access in 1943. Fellow inmates taught Ishimoto how to take and develop pictures. At the close of the war, he brought images of landscapes and festivities to Chicago, Illinois—the destination to which the War Relocation Authority assigned him. Despite the fact that his arrival in the city was part of a concerted effort to scatter Japanese Americans, Chicago became a hometown for Ishimoto. It was here that he became an artist.

1948 marked a pivotal year for Ishimoto, when he enrolled in the Photography Department at the Institute of Design. Under the tutelage of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, Ishimoto studied the modernist tenets of abstraction and ventured into the streets of Chicago. Moving between segregated neighborhoods and beaches, Ishimoto created black-and-white images that accentuated the lines and planes of the urban landscape, sometimes completely flattening three-dimensional space. “Among those iron and glass wall surfaces…I had found myself as an artist,” he reminisced.¹ Central to Ishimoto’s approach to the city was the turn to the people that inhabited it. He frequently photographed children playing, meeting them at eye level or observing them from close proximity. One such image was included in Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1955. Taking the lessons of Callahan and Siskind to heart, Ishimoto worked in series throughout his career and disseminated his imagery primarily through photobooks, most famously Someday Somewhere (1958) and Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960).

After graduation, Ishimoto moved to Japan, making arrangements for MoMA architecture curator Arthur Drexler to visit Katsura. This fortuitous visit in 1953 directed his vision to a new path. In the wooden beams and elevated platforms of the 17th-century imperial refuge, Ishimoto saw echoes of Mies van der Rohe’s high-rises. Like modern cities, the framing of the physical experience is of utmost importance at Katsura, where a pair of princes staged their fantasies and political alienation. A year later, Ishimoto returned to photograph the rustic palace, radically cropping wall panels, supporting beams, stepping stones, and verdant lawns. The monochrome photographs recomposed the lines, planes, and patterns of the complex and zoomed in on the textures of the ground. Ishimoto’s vision shocked architects in Japan. Until that point, architectural photography had been conceived of as purely documentary. Ishimoto set up an interlocution between classical Japanese and Western modernist architecture. His bold twists on the prevailing conventions of the medium and the unexpected juxtaposition of images in his books showed a younger generation of Japanese artists the experimental possibilities of photography.

Persistently recalibrating his vision, Ishimoto revisited Chicago and Katsura to see both places anew. For him, the built environment was transitory and sentient. From 1958 to 1961, Ishimoto returned to the Midwestern city with his creative collaborator and partner, Shigeru Ishimoto. This second series witnesses the urbanization of a postwar metropolis and its human impact, particularly on marginalized communities. Amid images of buildings crumbling and rising are photographs of children in Halloween costumes, anonymous pedestrians, and humdrum signs of life. They simultaneously celebrate and critique the modern human experience.

Inspired by a photoshoot of the Mandala of the Two Realms at Toji in Kyoto, Ishimoto revisited Katsura in color in 1982. The villa unfolded itself to the photographer again, and he saw how fitting the contradictions in architectural styles were this time. The iterative process of Ishimoto’s practice allowed him to confront the ambiguous features he had avoided decades prior. Working with the inherent properties of color photography, Ishimoto brought out a different kind of geometry through gradations of green, red, gray, and brown. He located the same frames he had photographed in 1954 and gave the images a new crop that was just as daring.

Ishimoto’s interest in the constant renewal of the environment—whether it be the streets of Tokyo or the Ise Shrine—occupied his thinking into the 1990s. In old age, the photographer continued to hone his vision by working with subjects that were physically accessible, such as clouds, crushed leaves, and flowers. In Ishimoto’s own words, “Everything is alive. I want to make a record of things that are living, to add my small voice to the voices they raise.”²

Casey Li, former 12-Month Intern, Department of Photography, 2024