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- history of Japanese photography, Yasuhiro Ishimoto

This unique alchemy is the result of a unique journey. Trained at the Institute of Design from 1948 to 1952, Ishimoto embodies the first generation of Chicago School photographers, marked by the dual influence of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Upon his return to Japan in 1953, he became a major figure in the Japanese art scene. His photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto will give rise to a body of work creating a shock wave in the world of architecture and design as evidenced by the words of artistic director Ikko Tanaka, for whom Ishimoto will be the first to introduce " an intellectual and austere modernism which greatly inspired us... His stone paths evoked sculptures by Brancusi... He cast a radically new look at the world.”
During the same period, Ishimoto opened the way to new ways of conceiving the photography book with the publication of one of the most important works in the history of Japanese publishing, Someday, Somewhere (1958). This book, with its experimental graphics for the time, will have a great influence on a young generation of photographers and designers.
Driven by a quest for permanent reinvention, Ishimoto will be one of the transmitters of modernity in photography, carrying out a work of crossbreeding between Japanese culture and Western influence. Looking at his scenes of Chicago or Tokyo, of such ordered, vibrant beauty, we understand that he became, to borrow the words of Stefan Zweig, a "completely extraordinary intermediary between Easterners and Westerners, a man with double dimension, capable on the one hand of contemplating from the outside with astonishment and respect, the foreign side of this beauty, and on the other of representing it and making us understand it as self-evident, as a beauty experienced from the 'inside and become his own. »