Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto (石元 泰博) was a Japanese-American photographer.

His decades-long career explored expressions of modernist design in traditional architecture, the quiet anxieties of urban life in Tokyo and Chicago, and the camera's capacity to bring out the abstract in the everyday and seemingly concrete fixtures of the world around him.

Born in the United States and raised in Japan, Ishimoto returned to the States as a young adult as the Second World War began to escalate, and was soon after sent to the Amache Internment Camp in Colorado after the signing of Executive Order 9066.

After the war, he studied photography at the Bauhaus-inspired Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and established a robust photographic practice between the United States and Japan.

As a transnational interlocutor between Japanese and American art and architecture circles, Ishimoto played a prominent role in bringing visions of Japanese architectural modernism to audiences abroad.

His father had come to the U.S. in 1904 at the age of 17 seeking agricultural work, eventually finding success as a salt farmer in California.

Ishimoto was born on June 14, 1921, in San Francisco, California, to Ishimoto Toma and Yoshine, who both hailed from Takaoka-cho, or present-day Tosa, in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan.

In 1924, the family left the United States and returned to his parents' hometown in Kochi.

Ishimoto attended Nada Narukawa Elementary School (now Tosa City Takaoka Daini Elementary School) and Kōchi Agricultural High School, where he was a competitive middle- and long-distance runner and participated in races at the national level at Meiji Jingu Gaien Stadium.

The following year, Ishimoto joined the Fort Dearborn Camera Club through the introduction of Japanese-American photographer Harry K. Shigeta, who co-founded the organization in 1924.

Founded by Moholy-Nagy in 1937, the school brought the pedagogical spirit of the Bauhaus to Chicago through its similar foundational interdisciplinary course and orientation towards human-centric design.

Moholy-Nagy shifted the craft-based distinctions entrenched in the German institution, which served to enhance gendered perceptions and discrimination, and instead split the school into three departments—architecture, product design, and light workshop (advertising arts).

In his teaching, Moholy-Nagy encouraged students to treat light as a "raw material," subject to experimentation and manipulation through carefully calibrated engagements with chemicals, atmospheric conditions, surfaces, camera settings, and spatial arrangements—an orientation that would percolate into Ishimoto's deliberate and meticulous arrangements of light and form in his architectural photographs.

Ishimoto studied with photographers such as Aaron Siskind, Gordon Coster, and Harry M. Callahan.

In comparison to his fellow instructors, Callahan was less interested in the theoretical dimensions of photography, and instead encouraged his students to go out into the city and take a more freeform approach to photographing whatever interested them most.

While at the ID, Ishimoto struck up a lasting friendship with fellow student Marvin E. Newman.

After graduating from high school, he returned to the United States in 1939 to study modern agricultural methods at the behest of his parents and teachers.

Ishimoto first lived with a Japanese farmer friend of his father, before moving in with an American family in Oakland, California and attending an elementary school to learn English.

He continued to study at Washington Union High School in Fremont and San Jose Junior College (now San Jose City College), while working on a farm over the summers.

In January of 1942, he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, School of Agriculture (now the University of California, Davis).

His studies were cut short, however, as the war in the Pacific quickly escalated.

On February 19, 1942, president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans across the west coast.

On May 21, 1942, Ishimoto was forcibly sent to the Merced Assembly Center in central California before being transferred to the Granada War Relocation Center, or Camp Amache, in Colorado, where he was assigned to work as a firefighter.

It was at the camp that Ishimoto first learned how to use a camera and develop film in the darkroom from fellow incarcerated Japanese Americans.

Though cameras had initially been confiscated by authorities, by May 1943 restrictions on cameras had lifted in camps outside of the Western Defense Command (including Amache), and Ishimoto began taking photographs around the camp using a Kodak 35mm camera.

Ishimoto and his fellow photographs used creative solutions to work through the technological limitations in the camp, recalling how his friend fashioned an enlarger from a ketchup container and the bellows from a folding camera.

After being granted temporary permission to leave the camp and visit Illinois in January of 1944, Ishimoto was twice questioned about his responses in the loyalty questionnaire before being officially released from the camp in December of 1944.

The War Relocation Authority had established its first resettlement office in Chicago, with the express goal of dispersing Japanese Americans from the west coast in order to weaken the strength of ethnic enclaves and diminish their allegiance to Japan.

Thus, Ishimoto found himself in Chicago, where he worked for silkscreen company Color Graphics (another skill he had picked up in the camps).

In 1946, he entered Northwestern University to study architecture.

Though he dropped out shortly after enrolling, architecture would hold an important place in his photographic practice.

In 1948, following the encouragement of Shigeta, Ishimoto enrolled in the Institute of Design (ID) of the Illinois Institute of Technology, otherwise known as the "New Bauhaus."

His photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa, taken in 1953-54 and published in 1960 as Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture, were widely celebrated in architecture and design circles for evoking the formal, geometric purity of the villa’s structural details with a deep sensitivity towards the atmospheric qualities of the space.

The book, which features accompanying essays by Kenzō Tange and Walter Gropius, was instrumental in stimulating the discourse surrounding modernism’s relationship to tradition in Japanese architecture.

Ishimoto’s work was exhibited widely in the United States and Japan during his lifetime, and two of his photographs were featured in the monumental 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man.

He maintained close ties to Chicago and published a series titled Chicago, Chicago in 1969.

In tandem with his architectural photographs, Ishimoto was a prolific recorder of everyday life.

His photographs of streetscapes and ordinary people captured the candor, anxiety, paradoxes, and joy of modern urban life through a sensitive and deliberate lens.

Many of the club members still adhered to the late 19th-, early 20th century conventions of pictorialism, which sought to replicate the painterly qualities of pictorial art through photography.

At the same time, Ishimoto encountered avant-garde publications such as György Kepes' The Language of Vision and László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, both of which had a profound impact on Ishimoto's thinking on the perceptual dimensions of the visual world and the structural qualities of the built and natural environments.