From Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture This is a story that starts in Japan, even though Yasuhiro was born in San Francisco. (In 1921.) His parents moved him back to Japan when he was 3. Then he moved back to the U.S. in 1939, to study in California, only to get caught up in the national outrage that was the internment. After the war, he moved to Chicago, where he studied with photographers like Aaron Siskind. He spent the rest of his life moving back and forth between Japan and the U.S. I say all that because now it’s de rigeur to have a trans-national, cosmopolitan life, to be “between identities” and “between countries” and all of that, but there was a time when it wasn’t so hip, when nobody wanted to hear about your “struggle,” they just looked at you suspiciously. And one of the things that’s so interesting about Yasuhiro is the way that his photographs reflect not just the values of whatever country he happens to be in at the moment but also the style. So his American photographs look really American, and his Japanese photographs look really Japanese. There’s no way to talk about this without being really reductive about different countries and cultures, but this is a really, REALLY hard thing for any artist to do. Copyright Ishimoto Yasuhiro

From Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture

This is a story that starts in Japan, even though Yasuhiro was born in San Francisco. (In 1921.) His parents moved him back to Japan when he was 3. Then he moved back to the U.S. in 1939, to study in California, only to get caught up in the national outrage that was the internment. After the war, he moved to Chicago, where he studied with photographers like Aaron Siskind. He spent the rest of his life moving back and forth between Japan and the U.S.

I say all that because now it’s de rigeur to have a trans-national, cosmopolitan life, to be “between identities” and “between countries” and all of that, but there was a time when it wasn’t so hip, when nobody wanted to hear about your “struggle,” they just looked at you suspiciously. And one of the things that’s so interesting about Yasuhiro is the way that his photographs reflect not just the values of whatever country he happens to be in at the moment but also the style. So his American photographs look really American, and his Japanese photographs look really Japanese.

There’s no way to talk about this without being really reductive about different countries and cultures, but this is a really, REALLY hard thing for any artist to do.

Copyright Ishimoto Yasuhiro