Representation; Sekula, Allan; Social Representa-
tion
Further Reading
Barrett, Terry.Interpreting Art. New York: McGraw Hill,
2003.
Barthes, Roland.Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang,
1981.
Barzman, Karen-Edis. ‘‘Beyond the Canon: Feminists,
Postmodernism, and the History of Art.’’The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism52, no. 3 (1994) 330.
Batchen, Geoffrey.Burning with Desire. Cambridge: Har-
vard, 1997.
Bolton, Richard, ed.The Contest of Meaning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Danto, Arthur.The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1981.
Eco, Umberto, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and
Christine Brooke-Rose.Interpretation and Overinterpre-
tation. Stefan Collini, ed. Cambridge University Press,
1992, 92, 111, 115, 150.
Goodman, Nelson.Languages of Art. Cambridge, MA:
Hackett, 1976.
Scheffler, Israel.In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions. New
York: Routledge, 1991, 7.
Sekula, Allan.Photography Against the Grain. Halifax: The
Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
1984, 53.
Wells, Liz, ed.The Photography Reader. London: Routle-
dge, 2003.YASUHIRO ISHIMOTO
American, Japanese
Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s work embodies a unique mix-
ture of Japanese, American, and European influ-
ences. Born to Japanese parents in San Francisco in
1921, he has worked as a Japanese citizen since 1961,
using a number of traditional Japanese themes. As
further proof of his impeccable Japanese credentials,
he was included in the canonicalPhotography and
The National Museum of Modern Art,Tokyo 1953–
1995 exhibition curated by Masuda Rei at the
National Museum of Modern Art, and he was
named a Man of Cultural Distinction by the Japa-
nese government in 1997. This belated identification
of his work as a part of the modern Japanese photo-
graphic tradition has overshadowed the pivotal
influence of the Bauhaus in his photographic educa-
tion and obscured the importance of the formative
yearsthathespentintheUnitedStates.
Although born in the United States, Ishimoto
returned to Japan at age three with his parents to
begin his schooling. Being born in the United
States granted him automatic citizenship, and in
1939, when he graduated from high school, he
returned to the United States to go to college. He
began studies in agriculture at the University of
California, but in 1942 his plans were interrupted
by the outbreak of World War II. Despite being a
citizen, he was interned in Armach, Colorado with
other Japanese Americans. Although this forcible
confinement could have been traumatic, he claims
that, as a young man, he was easily able to endure
the fieldwork, and the enforced break in his college
studies gave him time for contemplation that he
would otherwise have lacked.
At the end of the war, Ishimoto began studies in
architecture at Northwestern University, Evanston,
Illinois. Soon, however, after reading La ́szlo ́
Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, he transferred
to the celebrated photography program at Chica-
go’s Institute of Design. This program had been
founded in 1937 by Moholy-Nagy as The New
Bauhaus, and, by his death in 1946, it had incorpo-
rated many of the same tenets of design faith that
the original Bauhaus in Dessau had espoused.
Although he was under the tutorship of the inspira-
tional Harry Callahan and supervised by Aaron
Siskind, Ishimoto soon developed his own method
of working and won the Moholy-Nagy Prize in
1951 and then again in 1952.
After graduating from the Institute of Design in
1952, Ishimoto returned to Japan. His big break
came shortly thereafter, when one of his photo-
graphs was selected to be part of the monumental
1955 The Family of Man exhibition being put
together by Edward Steichen at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. The picture, of a young
girl loosely tied to a tree in a game of hide-and-seek,INTERPRETATION