Ishimoto Yasuhiro Centennial Yasuhiro Ishimoto

*Available only in Europe

*This book is secondhand.

Published to mark the centennial of Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012), this 301-page bilingual volume is the official catalogue of the large retrospective held in autumn 2020 at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Born in San Francisco, raised in Kochi, and drawn to photography while interned at Amache during the war, Ishimoto trained in Chicago at the Institute of Design under Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind, absorbing a rigorous Bauhaus modernism. The book surveys that whole arc rather than a single project: the taut geometry and play of light in his celebrated Katsura studies, the streets and citizens of Chicago and Tokyo, portraits, and his later abstractions. Reference apparatus—bibliography, list of works, and a chronology—rounds out the plates, giving the catalogue lasting research value. What emerges is the essence of his vision: an unsentimental, penetrating gaze and a robust structural sense that refuses easy "Japanese" atmosphere. Comprehensive and handsomely produced, it serves equally as an introduction for newcomers and a solid starting point for serious study.