About the artist
Born in San Francisco in 1921, Yasuhiro Ishimoto was raised in Kochi from the age of three. In 1939, fearing her son would be conscripted into the Japanese army, Ishimoto's mother arranged for him to return to the United States, where he began to study agriculture at the University of California. Ishimoto's studies were interrupted, however, by the United States' entry into World War II, at which time he was forced to relocate to the Amache Internment Camp in Colorado. Upon his release in 1945, Ishimoto enrolled in Northwestern University in Chicago to study architecture. However, his interest in photography led him to transfer to the recently established "New Bauhaus" school at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1953, where he immediately produced one of his most celebrated bodies of work, a series of photographs centered on the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. During another stay in Chicago from 1958 to 1961, Ishimoto proved to be an adept street photographer in the series Chicago, Chicago in 1969. The American photographer Minor White called him a "cultural bilinguist." Ishimoto passed away at the age of ninety in February 2012.