Born in 1921 in San Francisco, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, an American citizen, was raised in Japan and passed away in 2012. The 18-year old returned to California in 1939, where he was sent to an internment camp for Americans of Japanese descent when the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. For two years during his time at the camp, he learned photography techniques from other prisoners. Released before the end of the war, Ishimoto headed to Chicago and enrolled at the Chicago Institute of Design, which had been founded as the "New Bauhaus" by László Moholy-Nagy. Ishimoto studied there under the tutelage of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, two great American photographers whose aesthetics hewed closely to those of the abstract expressionist artists who were at their apotheosis. In 1953, Ishimoto returned to Japan and visited Kyoto for the first time with the architect Junzo Yoshimura and Arthur Drexler, who visited Japan in preparation for an exhibition at MoMA which featured the architecture of Japan. With an introduction to Katsura by Yoshimura and Drexler, Ishimoto started to develop an interest to document the Villa through his ingenious approach towards the architecture and space. Focusing on the stepping-stones in the gardens and the clean geometric lines of the spaces, the photographer took advantage of this commission to channel his technical savvy and artistic beliefs into a series of black and white images that quickly became symbolic and are now inseparable from their subject.
