Born in San Francisco but raised in Japan, Yasuhiro Ishimoto returned to the United States in 1939, studying architecture at Northwestern University in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Interned in an American concentration camp for two years during World War II, Ishimoto chose to return to Chicago in 1944, and in 1948 he entered the Institute of Design. Studying under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, Ishimoto developed a passion for photography and the city of his studies, memorialized years later in his great book, Chicago, Chicago (1969).
Ishimoto returned in 1953 to Japan, where his unique amalgam of Chicago-school modernism with elements of the fertile and innovative Japanese photography scene further galvanized his creativity. Ishimoto returned only once more to live in the United States, again in Chicago, in 1958-1961. During this time the Art Institute gave him a one-person show, as a result of which the first purchases and gifts entered the collection, including the prints offered here. Settled once again in Japan, Ishimoto continued to have a lengthy and much-recognized career. His works were featured at The Museum of Modern Art in 1974; the Rencontres Internationales in Arles, in 1994; and, again, at the Art Institute in 1999. The museum now holds several hundred of his photographs, including the most extensive collection of Ishimoto’s vintage prints anywhere in the world.
Titles include: (i) Japanese child wearing striped cloth with mask and spectacles, 1949 (ii) Little girl looking through fence by which a man is standing, 1948 (iii) Japanese food market, 1948 (iv) Stone bridge of Amanohashidate from Katsura, 1948