I have great admiration for Diane Dufour.
With LE BAL, successfully transforming Chez Isis, a prostitute bar and a brothel that became a ruined betting place into one of the most important places in world photography is always a constant delight.
And yet, her programming is always demanding.
Currently, she presents: Yasuhiro Ishimoto.
We dedicate this day to him.
Jean-Jacques Naudet
Yasuhiro Ishimoto, a destiny between two countries – By Agathe Cancellieri
Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012) remains a major yet little-known figure on the world photographic scene today. This anomaly perhaps finds its origin in the singularity of a destiny which placed him at the crossroads of multiple influences: a documentary approach in the great American tradition, an ascetic formalism inherited from his Japanese culture and a pronounced taste for experimentation inherent to the German Bauhaus.
Born in 1921 in San Francisco where his father worked for a salt production company, Ishimoto returned to Japan at the age of three and grew up on a farm on the island of Shikoku. In 1939, aged eighteen and with his American passport in his pocket, his family sent him to San Francisco to study agriculture, thus avoiding being conscripted into the Japanese army. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, caught up in the turmoil of the world conflict, Ishimoto suffered the fate of thousands of Japanese on American soil: he was interned and subjected to forced labor in the “regroupment” camp of Amache, in Colorado. It was there, thanks to an amateur friend, that he learned about all the stages of photography: shooting, development and printing. Upon his release in 1944, Ishimoto decided to study architecture. When refused permission to live on American shores (due to the military training he received in Japan when he was a high school student), his default choice was Chicago, which he saw on the “path” of New York, city where he dreamed of studying.
By Agathe Cancellieri, photography historian and gallery owner. A specialist of the Chicago School, she defended her thesis A new American vision: the photographic department of the Institute of Design in Chicago from 1946 to 1972 in 2019, at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Excerpts from Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Sweet Home Chicago, text from the book Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Des lignes et des corps.
