Neither truly Japanese nor fully American. It is in the ups and downs and between times that the incomparable destiny of Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012) was traced. This photographer of clear black and white images, who remained little known, was, however, a crucial transmitter of modernity in the postwar period. Formal essays and Chicago street children, radical visions of the imperial villa of Kyoto and dreamlike urban visions: an exhibition at BAL, in Paris, “ Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Lines and bodies”, accompanied by a magnificent book published by Atelier EXB, reveals his keen vision and the breadth of his work, also balanced between several poles: documentary photography, attention to the human and a taste for forms.
Ishimoto’s life was built in a zigzag, in a succession of more or less happy coincidences. Born in San Francisco to a Japanese farming family, then raised in Japan, his parents sent him back to California at age 18 to study agriculture and escape Japanese military service. But in 1939, in the United States, Japanese citizens were considered suspicious. He was sent to an internment camp in Amache, Colorado, where he remained throughout the war. He then involuntarily landed in Chicago.
The city would be a base for him: during the years he spent at the Institute of Design, an avant-garde school founded by the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy and heir to the German Bauhaus, he learned to find his personal visual grammar, draw his framework and create compositions from objects, shadows and materials.
Photographer Harry Callahan, who teaches there, also encourages him to get out of the studio to face life’s discoveries and accidents. And it is in this tension between formal experimentation and social vision where Ishimoto will find his style. In his images, bodies lying in the sand, legs of customers in a store, and African-American children in Halloween costumes impose a marked presence thanks to the extreme attention paid to lines, angles, and contrasts.
Fascinated by this austere architecture
But it is in Japan where Ishimoto will leave an indelible mark. When he returned there in 1953, after fourteen years of absence, on assignment for the director of the photography department at MoMA in New York, Edward Steichen, he no longer knew this country. He speaks halting Japanese. This distance allows you to take a new look at Katsura, the imperial villa in Kyoto, contemporary with the Palace of Versailles.
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