This book examines the work of US-born photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921–2012) through its connections to Chicago, where he lived for over a decade and returned to repeatedly throughout his life.
Long celebrated in Japan as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, Ishimoto also maintained deep ties to his adopted home city of Chicago, where he arrived in 1945 after having been imprisoned in a US internment camp during World War II. It was in Chicago that he developed his uniquely modernist vision in two key ways. First, he created works that engaged in important conversation with that of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and others at the historic Institute of Design. Second, he immersed himself directly in the city’s neighborhoods, where he captured important social changes reflective of broader shifts elsewhere in the United States.
This catalog—which accompanies an exhibition opening in September 2018 at the DePaul Art Museum—features both black-and-white and full-colour reproductions of key works by Ishimoto, as well as in-depth essays by exhibition cocurators Jasmine Alinder and John Tain.
