Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Called a “visual bilinguist” by Minor White, Yasuhiro Ishimoto bridged east and west in his art and life, taking photographs from the postwar period into the 21st century, merging western Modernism with a Japanese-inspired attention to fleeting moments and subtle beauty. Born in San Francisco and raised in Japan, he was in the U.S. during WWII, interned in a camp. Upon release, he entered the Chicago Institute of Design and honed his craft under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He spent the rest of his life shooting people and scenes on the streets of Chicago and Tokyo, as well as formal architectural settings, amassing a body of black-and-white and color images unified by his strong sense of form, composition, and detail. Ishimoto introduced a western sensibility to a younger generation of Japanese photographers, among them Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu.