Yasuhiro Ishimoto | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | June 14, 1921 |
| Died | February 6, 2012 (aged 90) |
| Occupation | Photographer |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Illinois Institute of Technology |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Photography |
| Institutions | Tokyo Zokei University Tokyo College of Photography |
Yasuhiro Ishimoto (石元 泰博, Ishimoto Yasuhiro[1], June 14, 1921 – February 6, 2012) 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 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.[2] 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.[3]: 35 He maintained close ties to Chicago and published a series titled Chicago, Chicago in 1969.[3]: 45 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.
- ^ Or sometimes Ishimoto Taihaku. For example, the photographs "Jidōsha no imēji" (自動車のイメージ; alternative English title "Land of Cars") in Asahi Camera February 1962, pp. 70–74, are credited to 石元泰博 and "Taihaku Ishimoto"; in his English-language summary at the back of the magazine, the editor refers to him as "Taihaku (Yasuhiro) Ishimoto".
- ^ Lederman, Russet (2016-01-29). "Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Katsura". Aperture. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
- ^ a b Westerbeck, Colin (1999). Yasuhiro Ishimoto : a tale of two cities. Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Arata Isozaki, Fuminori Yokoe, Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago. ISBN 0-86559-170-9. OCLC 44732638.