30 Facts About Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was a Japanese-American photographer.

Yasuhiro 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.

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

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

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

Yasuhiro Ishimoto's father had come to the US in 1904 at the age of 17 seeking agricultural work, eventually finding success as a salt farmer in California.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto attended Nada Narukawa Elementary School and Kochi 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.

Yasuhiro 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.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto continued to study at Washington Union High School in Fremont and San Jose Junior College, while working on a farm over the summers.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto's studies were cut short as the war in the Pacific quickly escalated.

On May 21,1942, Yasuhiro 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.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto taught photography at Kuwasawa Design School the Tokyo College of Photography at Tokyo Zokei University.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto died at the age of 90 on February 6,2012, after being hospitalized the month before for a stroke.

In English, Yasuhiro Ishimoto signed his name "Yas Ishimoto".

Steichen selected Yasuhiro Ishimoto to be part of a group show of twenty-five emerging photographers in 1953, followed by a three-person exhibition at MoMA in 1961.

In 1954, Yasuhiro Ishimoto held his first solo exhibition at Gallery Takemiya, a prominent avant-garde art space in Kanda, Tokyo run by poet and art critic Shuzo Takiguchi.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was featured in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo's first exhibition on photography in 1953, a group show titled The Exhibition of Contemporary Photography: Japan and America, alongside established figures such as Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and John Szarkowski.

The exhibition not only marked a new shift in the Japanese art world in terms of medium, but participated in the production of post-occupation cultural discourse between the United States and Japan, within which Yasuhiro Ishimoto was now fully immersed.

Many of the images Yasuhiro Ishimoto took using his 4x5 Linhof, he recalled, were shot on an up-to-date format that was not widely recognized in postwar Japan, leading to many of the negatives becoming ruined during the development process.

The photographs thus emerged at a time of immense flux and cultural reinvention, with Yasuhiro Ishimoto himself occupying a social and political threshold that enabled him with both physical access and a distinct visual perspective.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto honed in on structural and environmental details instead of capturing more conventional views of the architecture and garden as a whole.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto received a commission to retrace the spread of Islam beginning in Cordoba, Spain, and traversed across Asia to Fatehpur Sikri, India, and Xi'an, China.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto maintained close relations with many modern architects, including Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, and Hiroshi Naito, and photographed many of their buildings.

In 1993, Yasuhiro Ishimoto was invited to photograph Ise Grand Shrine during the 61st iteration of the ceremonial dismantling and rebuilding process, which takes place every twenty years.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto took cues from the series of architectural details photographed by Yoshio Watanabe in 1953, accentuating the lucid forms of the eaves and posts.

In contrast to Watanabe, who captured his images at late afternoon to create a more dramatic aura using stark contrasts of light and shadow, Yasuhiro Ishimoto opted to work under even midday lighting, infusing the setting with a softer and more brooding air.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto immersed himself in allies and parades, and captured a dynamic image of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto's family donated 34,753 prints, approximately 100,000 negatives and 50,000 positives, along with correspondences, camera equipment, and other archival materials to the Museum of Art, Kochi.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto's work is held in numerous major museum collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Kawasaki City Museum, Yamaguchi Prefectural Art Museum, Yokohama Museum of Art, Musashino Art University, Tokyo Polytechnic University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, and the Bauhaus Archive.