(b San Francisco, CA, 14 June 1921). Japanese photographer, active also in the USA. He was brought up in Japan and in 1939 returned to the USA, where he studied agriculture and architecture before photography. In 1952 he graduated from the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where he had studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, and in 1953 returned to Japan. He published works in Japanese photography magazines and a collection of his own photographs, Aru hi, aru tokoro (‘Someday, somewhere’; Tokyo, 1958). At the same time he photographed the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto, one of the great buildings of the 17th century, publishing the results as Katsura (Tokyo, 1960). This collection, which showed the influence of Callahan and Siskind, involved a new way of interpreting the traditional beauty of Japan and was somewhat shocking to the Japanese. His uncompromising style had a strong influence on the photographers working in the Vivo (Esperanto: ‘life’) group, especially Ikko Narahara, Eikoh Hosoe and Kikuji Kawada. Again resident in Chicago from 1958 to 1961, Ishimoto took mainly snapshots; the result, the collection Chicago, Chicago (Tokyo, 1969), won the Mainichi Art Prize. In subsequent years he developed his interest in the Japanese sense of beauty, typified in the Katsura Detached Palace, while also recording the rapidly changing metropolis of Tokyo.