YASUHIRO ISHIMOTO | PRESS RELEASE

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs is pleased to present Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Gifts to a Friend, a tribute to a photographer celebrated both in Japan and the United States who passed away earlier this year. The exhibition spans forty years of the artist’s career and attests to his versatility in the medium as well as a sensibility dually formed by studies in modernist aesthetics in the US and a strong Japanese cultural identity. Subjects presented range from street scenes and abstractions to nudes and flowers. Most images are gelatin silver prints but experimental color work is also included.

The main gallery features a set of 15 prints from the 1980s and 1990s that Ishimoto sent from Japan over the course of two decades as annual gifts to a friend in New York City. Complementing this mature body of graceful minimalist images, the adjacent gallery presents photographs he made while a student at Chicago’s Institute of Design (1948-1952) and during a subsequent residency in the city (1958-1961). Viewed together, these prints recount the artist’s journey of discovery, evolution, and ultimately, synthesis.

Ishimoto was born is San Francisco in 1921 and raised in Japan from the age of three to eighteen. He returned to the US to pursue his studies but was interrupted by the outbreak of WWII and his confinement to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Colorado. Upon his release, he moved to Chicago and, inspired by the writings of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, enrolled at the Institute of Design (founded by Moholy-Nagy in 1937 as the New Bauhaus).

In the early 1950s Edward Steichen, then director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was introduced to Ishimoto’s work by Harry Callahan and included it in his groundbreaking exhibition and book, The Family of Man (1955). Ishimoto’s first solo exhibition in the United States took place in 1960 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The next year his work was shown at MoMA and since then there have been many other exhibitions of his work at prominent museums across the US and Japan. Ishimoto moved back to Japan permanently in 1961.

Over twenty monographs have been published on his photographs; seminal among them is Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture, the 1960 book produced with Kenzo Tange and Walter Gropius. Fifty years later, the project was the focus of book and exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This museum’s collection along with those at Art Institute of Chicago and Kochi Museum in Japan are major repositories of his prints, leaving few available in the market. In 1996, Ishimoto was honored with the distinction of being recognized as a Person of Cultural Merit by the Government of Japan.

The Gallery, located at 764 Madison Avenue (65-66th streets), is open from Wednesday – Saturday 11am-6pm. Please call for hours the week of July 4th. The following week, we will change to summer hours, Tuesday – Friday 11am-5pm. For more information or additional visuals by any of the artists please contact the Gallery at (212) 517-8700 or email info@lparkerstephenson.nyc.