Gelatin silver prints
After Ishimoto was permitted to leave the Japanese American concentration camp where he was detained in Colorado, he moved to Chicago. In 1948, he enrolled at the Institute of Design, where he studied modernist principles of abstraction and committed himself to photographic practice. On the shores of Lake Michigan, the artist observed the arrangements of bodies featured in his Chicago photographs—many of which emphasize the linearity of human limbs through steep vertical crops. The images of this series were later included in Ishimoto’s first photobook, Someday, Somewhere (1958).
409: Dance Index, 2026
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Yasuhiro Ishimoto
Japanese, born United States. 1921–2012 42 works onlineYasuhiro 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.
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Dance Index
Gallery 409This gallery borrows its title from that of a journal established in 1942 by Lincoln Kirstein—a cultural polymath who cofounded New York City Ballet and was a key figure in MoMA’s early history.
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