Art Institute of Chicago Yasuhiro Ishimoto Tale of Two Cities

Although he is a Japanese photographer who has lived in Tokyo for more than 45 years, Yasuhiro Ishimoto received his art education in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he studied under Harry Callahan. Ishimoto's photographs of Chicago document a period of profound social, political and racial change and record the character of the city from its lakefront beaches and downtown streets to its South Side neighborhoods. Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1953 and began a documentation of Tokyo. In his work, Tokyo and Chicago have become sister cities, not in a commercial or touristic sense, but in the personal vision of an artist whose tenacity of observation has enabled him to produce this extraordinary body of work.