Chicago, c. 1950
Vintage gelatin silver print
Image size: 11 ¼ × 7 ⅞ in
Sheet size: 17 × 13 ½ in
Embossed on recto
October 7, 2024
This scrappy photo plays like a riff on the hard-boiled characters found in early Hollywood crime dramas. The pugnacious youngster in the rubber Halloween mask mugs for the camera in front of a late 1940s model Buick Super, a muscular make of car that graced the screen in films like the Maltese Falcon.
This playful picture was made while Japanese American photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto was studying with Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design in Chicago, and the difference between the two photographers' visions of the same city is striking. Both treated the city as a kind of performative stage, but where Callahan favored calculated distance and restraint, Ishimoto embraced the spontaneous energy of chance encounters on the sidewalks.
Born in San Francisco, and raised in Japan before returning to the United States, Ishimoto took up photography while he was being held in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Ishimoto moved to Japan after his graduation in 1952, where he continued to develop his photographic art, but he maintained strong ties to Chicago. A fellowship awarded by the Minolta camera company brought him back to the city from 1959-61, and yielded a one person show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960, which solidified his reputation as a cross-cultural photographer with a keen eye for the American experience.
