Yasuhiro Ishimoto photographed with a touch of New Bauhaus a masterpiece of Japanese architecture and gardens

‘It was with the ‘Katsura Imperial Villa’ series in 1954 that Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012) created a photographic masterpiece, a Japanese national treasure that has remained in publication and which still continues to receive praise to this today. However, when you look at the villa that appear in this collection – a villa that Japanese photographers at the time avoided or were unable to photograph – you are bound to be awed by its bold compositions and simplicity.

You may be asking yourself whether Ishimoto himself was not Japanese. It is known that he was born in San Francisco, moved to his parent’s hometown of Kochi Prefecture in Japan when he was 3 years old before returning to the USA to Chicago at the age of 18 – an upbringing that spanned across Japan and America. Then, at the outbreak of the Pacific War and despite holding American nationality, he was locked up in a Japanese internment camp in Colorado. It was during this time that he took an interest in photography and soon studied under the tutelage of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Chicago Institute of Design. The fact is the predecessor to this school was founded by László Moholy-Nagi who taught at ‘Bauhaus’ in Germany – the school that had become known for its classes on progressive photography.

Going back to the Ishimoto’s photographs of Katsura, this project was in fact originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Even for Ishimoto who had also at one time studied architecture, to photograph the unadorned style of Japanese architecture had seemed to be rather challenging, so he first photographed only the gardens and its stones. It was at the end of visiting almost every day that he finally started taking photographs of the outside and interiors.

The Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto was built in the 17th century as a villa for the Hachijō-no-miya family. Although it is an imperial villa which also consists a drawing room, tea rooms, and a garden with a large pond in the center, famed German architect Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan for a time after feeling Nazi Germany, was effusive in his praise of the villa, stating that it is ‘so beautiful you could cry’. The method of modernist architecture that underlines the figurative arts was also directly felt by Ishimoto, and I believe it was that element he wanted to capture.

According to Ishimoto of that time: “what instantly caught my eye was the white wall of the drawing room and the glimpses of shadows on the white shoji screens. I then was reminded of the Lake Shore Drive Apartments of Mies van de Rohe (A leading German architect of modernist architecture) for some reason. Rather than thinking of it as old architecture, I perhaps saw inside the modern style of Mies from the beginning”. It was perhaps from that point where he completely rejected the Japanese state of mind and threw himself into putting into practice the objective approach he had learned in Chicago.

Just before he passed away, I was fortunate to meet Mr Ishimoto for the first and last time in Tokyo at what ended up being his final solo exhibition ‘Mandala of the Two Realms’. To be able to briefly discuss the Katsura photography with him remains a wonderful memory to this day. But I still not had the opportunity to visit the ‘essence of Japan’ that is the Katsura Imperial Villa – so in the near future, I would like to slowly take a stroll but there and take it in from a New Bauhaus point of view.