Someday, Somewhere

Yasuhiro Ishimoto
Someday, Somewhere

Photographs: Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Text: Tsutomu Watanabe

Publisher: Geibi Shuppan

Pictures: 185

Year: 1958

Comments: Hardcover with dust jacket, 285 x 229 mm. First edition, 1958. 2 folding pages. Gravure printing. Included in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook, vol.I, p.272-273 ; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Japanese photobooks of the 1960's and 70's, p.40 . The dust jacket has 2 small chips and a few tears. In very good condition other than a fold on the fold-out page.

"Like William Klein, Yasuhiro Ishimoto represented an influential link between Japanese and American photography, although from a different photographic tradition. (...) In 1958 he had the disctinction of producing the first major postwar Japanese photobook, the elegant Aruhi Arutokoro (Someday, Somewhere). Shot in Chicago and Tokyo, the book is divided into three sections. The first concentrates on forms and textures on Japanese streets, and displays the tendency to abstraction and formalism that marked the Chicago School of the Callahan-Siskind era. Ishimoto adds a Japanese austerity to this familiar idiom, but sections two and three are more interesting. Here he turns to beach and street candids, reminiscent of the anonymous street portraits of Callahan or Walker Evans, but given his own quirkly voice - a wistful, world-weary quality that applies even to his images of children playing. Like Callahan, his voice is measured and distanced. Unlike Callahan, the distance is respectful and warm rather than cool, while the dark tenor pervading his work gives his pictures a singular edginess, especially in his creepy portraits of children wearing Halloween masks.

Someday, Somewhere is a photobook of truly international stature, providing Japanese photographers with a model of expression that transcended both the parochial and the purely documentary tendency dominating Japanese photography of the time."

Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook : A History