Long peaceful corridors. Beams echoing their grid-like shadows against white walls. Still trees gently caressing rooftops. The magic of black-and-white photography in capturing and preserving moment such as these succumbs to Japanese photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro’s keen eye in “Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro,” an exhibition opening at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston on June 20. Ishimoto was born to Japanese parents in San Francisco in 1921, moved to Japan at age three, and returned to the United States in 1939. The show celebrates the 50th anniversary of Katsura, a 1960 book that chronicled Ishimoto’s collaboration with architects Kenzo Tange and Walter Gropius.
Widely acclaimed as one of the most influential characters in postwar Japanese photography, Ishimoto is most known for his images of the 17th-centry imperial villa Katsura in Kyoto from the 1950’s. In these photographs, Ishimoto began to translate a modernist Bauhaus esthetic in the manner he captured iconic and traditional Japanese architecture. The show at MFAH includes 70 photographs of Katsura, all presented un-cropped as Ishimoto intended for the very first time.
Apparently even niche architectural photography has its drama. When the photographs were first presented by architect Tange Kenzo in his landmark book Katsura: Creation and Tradition in Japanese Architecture, they were substantially cropped and sequenced to follow Kenzo’s own sociocultural agenda. The book argued that tradition and pre-modern architecture was vital to Japan while coming to terms with modernity in post-occupation Japan in the mid-1950’s.
In this context, the exhibition explores the complex relationship between architecture, photography, Japanese tradition, and modernism. At a time when tradition versus modernity was a hot debate, Ishimoto’s photographs would have particularly resonated with how the public interpreted Japanese tradition within modern architecture.
Even without the backdrop of the Kenzo debate, Ishimoto’s photographs stand on their own as both photographical and architectural icons. Mostly gelatin silver prints, the 70 on view for this exhibition are part of 300 Ishimoto works that were gifted to the museum last year, and were selected by curator of the exhibition Yasufumi Nakamori in close collaboration with Ishimoto himself. The book’s “images and ideas crystallized the Japanese interpretation of Bauhaus esthetics and functionalism, and gave a cue to a younger generation of Japanese architects in mid-century Japan…who had been struggling to locate tradition in their modern designs,” explains Nakamori. “The book…proved that the function-based expressions of pre-modern Japanese architecture were still relevant, coupled with new architectural technologies and materials.”
The Katsura villa photographs translate geometrical architecture into the grid-like composition of modernist painting via Ishimoto’s large-format camera. Close-up shots abstract stepping stones into the shapes of a Joan Miró mobile, zooming in on wood grain recalls the vertical canvases of Barnett Newman, and traditional screens and structural columns become pure geometry. In contrast, earlier photographs of the site had captured its nostalgia in the same manner one would chronicle a family portrait. Even without Kenzo’s intrusion, Ishimoto makes his own argument for modernism with his unabashed embrace of form. After all, the triumph of art approaching life – no boundaries – is modernism’s favorite trump card. Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 713-639-7300; http://www.mfah.org/
