Katsura: Picturing Modernism
in Japanese Architecture,
Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
168 pages | 160 images
College Art Association, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, 2011
In 1960, a book of Ishimoto’s photographs of the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa was organized by Tange Kenzo,
who cropped the photos to fit his vision of modern architecture. Fifty years later, Nakamori’s book presents the uncropped images as Ishimoto intended. The bands on the clear jacket reveal Tange’s extreme crop of Ishimoto’s photo, printed in full on the cover beneath. The text block follows the golden rectangle, echoing the proportions of the tatami mats and other structures at Katsura. Together, Nakamori and I sequenced the photographs from stones and gardens to exterior pavilions, then indoors and back outside again. The photographs are printed as tri-tones, proofed early in the process to match ten prints on loan from Ishimoto’s gallery in Japan. This book received a College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.
