Yasuhiro Ishimoto was born in 1924 in San Francisco to Japanese immigrants. He spent his childhood in Japan and returned to the U.S. as a teenager. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Ishimoto was among the thousands Japanese-Americans swept up in prison camps after the American government questioned their loyalty as citizens.<\/p>\n
The War Relocation Authority, in charge of running the prison camps and resettling their prisoners, relocated Ishimoto to Chicago after his release. There, he found a supportive community of photographers who encouraged him to enroll in Chicago\u2019s Institute of Design. Established as the new Bauhaus in 1939, the photography program was run by famous photographer Harry Callahan.<\/p>\n \u201cThere aren\u2019t very many places in the country where you could study photography, especially as an art form,\u201d Alinder said. \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s extremely fortuitous that Ishimoto ends up in Chicago and becomes a product of the Institute of Design.\u201d<\/p>\n After graduation, Ishimoto spent the rest of his life traveling back and forth between the United States and Japan. He loved Chicago, and its people became the subjects of his photography.<\/p>\n He published his best-known photography book,\u00a0\u201cChicago, Chicago,\u201d in 1969, the same year that he became a Japanese citizen. Alinder speculates that doing so was easier for his visas, given that his wife was a Japanese national \u2013 and because Ishimoto\u2019s incarceration left a psychological mark.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I think is still lingering from the legacy of the way that the U.S. government portrayed Japanese-Americans during World War II is that people couldn\u2019t be Japanese and American at the same time,\u201d she said. \u201cThose two identities were irreconcilable. Understanding Ishimoto, it\u2019s really important that we acknowledge his American-ness and his Japanese-ness. Those identities can exist side-by-side and are important for understanding his work.\u201d<\/p>\n Bringing the exhibit to life<\/strong><\/p>\n The\u00a0\u201cSomeday, Chicagoexhibit was born out of a chance remark. In 2016, Alinder was working on another project called the Virtual Asian American Art Museum (that project launches at DePaul in October). At an advisory meeting for the project, a board member suggested that Alinder team up with another board member curate a show about Ishimoto at the DePaul Art Museum.<\/p>\n Two years later, Alinder and her co-curator, John Tain from the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, opened the \u201cSomeday, Chicago\u201d exhibition. The show includes dozens of black-and-white photographs, two cases with books and pamphlets, three films, one screen cycling through digital photographs and one iPad.<\/p>\n Alinder and Tain were responsible for selecting photographs for display, as well as compiling the gallery notes and writing extensive essays analyzing Ishimoto\u2019s life and work. One research trip took Alinder to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where she found Ishimoto\u2019s case file from his time in the Amache prison camp.<\/p>\n Most interesting was his leave clearance interview: Like all incarcerated Japanese-Americans, Ishimoto was required to take a loyalty test which asked if he was willing to serve in the U.S. military and if he renounced all loyalty to the Japanese emperor.<\/p>\n In these transcripts, Alinder said, \u201cYou get a sense of Ishimoto creating a political sensibility. In the hearing, he is asked about his loyalty to the U.S. and if he would fight for the U.S., and he says, \u2018I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m fighting for.\u2019 He articulates the development of a political conscience that we didn\u2019t really have evidence of before. That I think ends up informing the kind of work that he does later in Chicago.\u201d<\/p>\n Another trip took Alinder to Ishimoto\u2019s family home in Kochi, Japan. Ishimoto donated most of his work to the Kochi Art Museum.<\/p>\n \u201cWe found a photo album that Ishimoto had made pretty early on. The first half of the images are all of Amache. He took photographs of Amache, and not just any photographs \u2013 photographs that are visually compelling. \u2026 It\u2019s important from an artistic perspective because we can see he\u2019s starting to develop this interesting artistic vision before he gets to Chicago and goes to the Institute of Design. He\u2019s already thinking in terms of light and texture and composition.\u201d<\/p>\n Exhibition takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\n The photographs in the exhibit reveal Ishimoto\u2019s deep love for Chicago and its citizens.<\/p>\n \u201cHe also gives us a glimpse into late 1940s through early 1960s Chicago, and he focuses on groups of people that often go un-pictured. He spends a lot of time, in this highly-segregated city like Milwaukee, in African-American neighborhoods,\u201d Alinder noted. \u201cHe really invests his subjects with humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n But Alinder suspects that even his feelings for Chicago and Japan didn\u2019t erase the fractures in Ishimoto\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he\u2019s in the U.S., he\u2019s not really considered American. When he\u2019s in Japan, he\u2019s not really considered Japanese. You\u2019re constantly trying to answer questions like, who am I? Where do I belong? Where is \u2018home\u2019? How do I fit in here?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Those questions echo today as America still grapples with ideas of race, citizenship, and what it means to be American. Inspiring viewers to think about those questions may be one of the greatest legacies of Ishimoto\u2019s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jasmine Alinder hopes that audiences will not only appreciate the images but also ask themselves an important question: What does it mean to be American?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":785,"featured_media":64871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[174,1],"tags":[249],"section":[127,128],"display_categories":[115,116],"related-coverage":[],"uwmnews-feed":[158,159],"class_list":["post-64724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-uncategorized","tag-community-engagement","section-arts-humanities","section-humanities","display_categories-top-story-secondary","display_categories-top-story-section","uwmnews-feed-letters-science","uwmnews-feed-humanities"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/41\/2018\/11\/Ishimoto-cover-cropped250x300-250x300.jpg\"){kind=spacer}