Children in the backstreets of Chicago and Tokyo 80 years ago.

Children playing in the backstreets of Tokyo until dusk have all but disappeared today. Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921–2012) was born in San Francisco to Japanese immigrant farmers. He studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, founded by László Moholy-Nagy, and later became a photographer who discovered modernism within traditional Japanese architecture such as Ise Shrine and Katsura Imperial Villa.

The reason why photographers and designers from around the world now make pilgrimages to Kyoto’s Katsura Imperial Villa lies in the vision of two figures: Bruno Taut and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. In particular, Ishimoto’s Bauhaus-trained sense of form was nothing short of sensational.

The legendary photographs of Katsura Imperial Villa were taken in 1953, when he had only just been an art student in Chicago the year before. During his student years in Chicago, he photographed children at Halloween. He continued photographing children in the alleys of Chicago and Tokyo through the late 1950s—children who were bold, resilient, and beautiful.

This book is a re-edited volume drawn from his first photo book, Someday Somewhere (1958), selecting only photographs of children and adding previously unpublished photographs. 

At the end of the book is an essay, The 63rd Lesson, by Tokuko Ushioda, who studied under Ishimoto at the Kuwasawa Design School. The book design is by Hideyuki Saito. The cover is made by joining two different papers. It is a tribute to Ishimoto, who expressed a unique monochrome world through countless gradations of black and white across Chicago and Japan. The seamless joining of the black and white papers without any visible step is a testament to remarkable craftsmanship.

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Profile
Yasuhiro Ishimoto was born on June 14, 1921, in San Francisco, USA. At the age of three, he returned to Kochi Prefecture, his parents’ hometown, and graduated from Kochi Prefectural Agricultural High School in 1939. That same year, he moved alone to the United States, but soon after, the Pacific War began, and he experienced life in an internment camp. After the war, he studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago (commonly known as the New Bauhaus), where he trained not only in photographic techniques but also in the formal sensibilities that would become the foundation of his work. He later gained international recognition for his photographs revealing the modernism of Katsura Imperial Villa. He is also known for photographing the works of leading Japanese architects such as Kenzo Tange, Kiyonori Kikutake, Arata Isozaki, and Hiroshi Naito.