The gift of Japanese photography is that it feels like a never-ending field of exploration. It is a wide field of study, and if one invests in the material created in Japan from around 1958 forward, the returns are plentiful. Having put off embracing the canon of Japanese photography for most of my career despite starting with Nobuyoshi Araki’s photobook Tokyo Lucky Hole (Taschen Version) along with Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Andres Serrano’s History of Sex as three of the first photobooks that I purchased in the 90s, only the past two years have been wholly consumed with the Japanese photobook. I have sought out titles known and unknown and developed a strong affinity to the National Camera of Japan, particularly books produced in the 1970s. The known titles that I have pursued were classics from artists like Moriyama, Shinoyama, Kimura, Domon, Hosoe, Fukase, Narahara, Nakahira, Takanashi, Ishiuchi, Suda, Ueda, and Tomatsu. I have rounded out my shelves with further works that could be better known by artists like Inakoshi, Kurihara, Kitai, Naito Oshida, Sato, Seto, Suzuki, Yoshiyuki, Watanabe, Wakabayashi.
The development of the Japanese photobook at such an early stage as a medium of expression arguably comes from the nation’s late acceptance of photography as a potential commodity in galleries. I have read that the proliferation of the photobook medium beginning in the 1960s with several high-profile books was spurned on by a need for more access to the market and an outlet. Whereas photobooks have never been a significant contributor to an artist’s wealth, they did give artists access to a platform that would allow them to see their work distributed. Japan’s incredible emphasis on the photo magazine through Camera Mainichi, Camera Asahi, Main, and others also ensured a distribution of photography that would encourage several generations of artists to find their voice. Asahi, in particular, in its serial format, gave photographers a brilliant platform to test their work before putting it into book form. These practices made the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s Japanese photography robust.
Within the pantheon of collectible Japanese photobooks of the era, several prominent titles, however expensive, dominate the collector’s landscape. Hunter and Farewell Photography by Moriyama, For a Language to Come by Takuma Nakahira, Yokosuka Story by Ishiuchi, Toshi-e by Yutaka Takanashi, and several books by Shomei Tomatsu dominate the books on books section of releases centered on photobooks of the 20 and 21st Centuries. Those books are fantastic, but underneath that primary layer of collecting, there exist sub-layers of excellence. It is with this thought that I come to cover the books of Ishimoto Yasuhiro, many of which I own in the first edition except for Katsura. As with most Japanese photobooks, the first thing that draws one to the era of the late 50s-through the 1980s is the Japanese insistence of using gravure printing, which produces rich, deep blacks that are pretty much absent in the contemporary record of photobook production. Of course, this speaks nothing to the mastery of image-making, which I can assure you, in Ishimoto’s case, is supremely high.
The first book worth speaking about that helps orient the viewer toward Ishimoto’s subject matter and background, which is exciting and complex is Someday Somewhere, published in 1958 by Geibi Shuppansha. Ishimoto was born in San Francisco, though he lived much of his early and later life in Japan. Born in America, his family left back to Japan when he was three. From there, as a young adult, he returned to America to study agriculture but was detained in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the war. Following his detention, and due in large part to having met a friend interested in photography in the Japanese-American concentration camp, he decided to make his way to Chicago, a future focus of much of his work, to study photography at the Institute of Design, an influential American type of Bauhaus university revered for its instructors. Started by Lazlo Maholy-Nagy and later spearheaded by Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, amongst others, the ID offered an incredible learning environment for prospective students who wanted to think through photography as a tool with graphic potential and a tool for subjective expression. Callahan, Ishimoto’s teacher, was highly influential for many artists who attended the school. Dubbed by Agathe Cancellieri as a reluctant mentor, Callahan and his way of teaching basic ideas regarding form, light, line, and expression influenced the young Ishimoto (1).
With Chicago as a backdrop, Ishimoto began developing his style independent of his instructor, particularly with his emphasis on children and people at the beach in the summer. Images of people in motion would also define his later work, as would architecture, which would illustrate his book Katsura, produced in Japan. Chicago was and still is a town that great architects define, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Louis Sullivan. Richard Nickel, a student at ID, is also of note for documenting the architectural loss of Chicago through the 50s and 60s before his untimely death. As a setting, Chicago offered Ishimoto several motifs to work through, images of young black children being incredibly memorable as well as architectural photographs of the city. These motifs were printed on deep black gravure in his book Someday Somewhere, heightening the tactile quality of the images. One must also remember that this book came out in 1958, the same year as Robert Frank’s The Americans, and both offer a decidedly different take on the country. With Frank, there is a tremendous sense of doubt, as seen from a Swiss foreigner looking at the country’s complexities. With Ishimoto, you have an American-born, Japan-raised insider/outsider who, having experienced internment, still finds sympathetic ways to immortalize the country, particularly its middle-class and disenfranchised people. There is melancholy in Someday Somewhere, but it is less gloomy than Frank’s take on America, and like Callahan before him, there is also a profound sense of formal composition.
The second book or two books worth mentioning are the books Ishimoto made entitled Chicago (1969) and Chicago Chicago (1983), both of which are still available, with the latter being relatively inexpensive. I mention these mostly as they tie in very nicely with Someday Somewhere. As a prolific shooter with thousands of Chicago images in his archive, Ishimoto could have produced several more books on the subject. The first Chicago book is beautifully printed in gravure and feels like a continuation of his first book, though there is less experimentation with some of the book’s layout. It is beautifully slipcased in an illustrated box and reminds one of Someday Somewhere quite a bit in its levity. The second volume Chicago Chicago is also fantastic, but it has a different feel. While people are a part of the book, architecture and urban landscape dominate most of the book. It was also produced decades later when the artist had clearly enjoyed years of development and it is almost…slick in terms of photographic style.
Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1961 before becoming naturalized and settling in 1968. He created several books through this time frame. His book Katsura was technically made throughout the 1950s but published in 1960, two years after Someday Somewhere. Katsura has a forward by Walter Gropius and despite the heavy editing hand of Tange, a Japanese architect who cropped and re-edited Ishimoto’s images to his liking, emerges a powerful, if slightly devious version of Ishimoto’s work on the imperial architecture of Katsura. Sadly, it is a book I do not own, but it is a volume I will eventually track down. It is a study of lines, architecture, and has the effect of being painterly in as much as painting might be considered as relating to the modernism of Piet Mondrian.
The second volume I want to mention is Toshi/Tokyo from the ‘Eizo no Gendai’ series published by Chūō-kōron-sha and edited by industrious Shoji Yamagishi. The book is one of the often unspoken volumes in Ishimoto’s career, and I feel it is vastly overlooked. There is something incredibly magical about how Ishimoto photographs the streets of Tokyo with its canals and overhanging wires that remind me of the contemporary work of Osamu Kanemura (the artist with the most outstanding book titles). Aside from the gorgeous photographs that Ishimoto made, there is a strange sense of a type of compressed city surrealism in the book, with a few images that emphasize pictures within pictures that give an eerie glow to the work. There is something lyrical in the nature of the light as it bounces off surfaces. Still, overall, there is a feeling of displacement, which may or may not be attributed to Ishimoto’s sense of being Japanese, but with a heavy emphasis on feeling partially American, a stranger and inhabitant of both countries. It is only a guess, but to echo exhibition director Diane DuFour, Ishimoto was visually bilingual, and much of this likely defines his position.
I bring all of these works by Ishimoto to the front mainly because, though he is celebrated and known, he is less celebrated in the West than some of his contemporaries like Moriyama and Araki. Though Ishimoto comes from a generation (possibly two) previous to the Provoke Era, I think his work is still underrated outside of Japan, and even in Japan, it’s interesting to think of him having an often more American aesthetic in the work because of the ID schooling. He is a perpetual outsider. Fortunately for us, the new book and exhibition published by Le Bal/Atelier EXB absolves us from looking for expensive primary materials. Ishimoto Lines and Bodies is a much overdue book on the master’s work and comes at a time when there seems to be a new bubbling up of energy around Japanese photography, which seems to come and go in cycles.
In Ishimoto Lines and Bodies, most of the artist’s significant works are covered and the book gives new readers of his work an insight into his technical genius and formal compositions. The book hints at the greatness of the original publications. Still, as a new volume, it is strong enough as an overview to give the reader enough taste to decide if they wish to pursue the original volumes, which are mostly expensive, barring Chicago Chicago. The essays in the forward and in the Back by Diane Dufour, Agathe Cancellieri, Yasufumi Nakamori, and Mei Asakura illuminate both the biography of Ishimoto and undergird the importance his work between the worlds of America and Japan.
There is a significant companion volume of Ishimoto at 100 that can be picked up, entitled Yasuhiro Ishimoto Centennial from 2020, which has even more essays. One wonders, given that both the Ishimoto Yasuhiro Photo Center and The Museum of Art, Koichi, were involved with that book and exhibition if this venture is not a variation of that publication and exhibition in its post-covid Le Bal form. Either way, both volumes are essential, but the Le Bal/Atelier EXB volume has a reasonably distinct edge over the Centennial volume as its design is much more precise, and the photographs are given exceptional emphasis with the four fold-outs present in the book reminiscent of images in Someday Somewhere.
Having not seen the exhibition, I am sure it follows suit and is exceptional. Diane Dufour is a lightning rod for great exhibitions in a space that is not overly huge, and she should always be commended for the significant offerings she provides. I hope to see the exhibition at the beginning of November. In the meantime, I think you should pick this book up. It is one of several much-needed Western books on the artist, whose life and career are profoundly fascinating. Ishimoto Lines and Bodies is handled with great aplomb, and its design follows the sensitivities of the original publications with no cost spared on the pullouts. It is undoubtedly one of the most essential historical tracts of the year, followed by several other Japanese books that Atelier EXB has helped to make happen. I’ll let you know more about that soon.
Highest Recommendation!
(1) Cancellieri, Agathe. Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Sweet Home Chicago. Pg 192. Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Lines and Bodies. 2024. Le Bal/Atelier EXB