"Dear Corbu, everything we've been fighting for has parallels in ancient Japan culture. The Japanese house is the best and most modern I know and it is truly prefabricated."
Walter Gropius, who visited Japan in 1954, wrote these enthusiastic words to his friend Le Corbusier. As a founder of the Bauhaus School (along with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier) he aimed at "standardisation, prefabrication and simplicity" - and was surprised to find all these principles in Japan.
In 1960 a stunning square book, "Katsura. Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture" was published, with essays by Walter Gropius, Kenzo Tange and 140 photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro, the book coverered in blue silk with a white circle in the middle, intended as a reference to the Japanese flag.
Now the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin shows an exhibition of 50 photographs of Katsura by Ishimoto Yasuhiro.
Everything I quote here I learned from this exhibition.
Yasuhiro was born in 1921 in San Francisco and spent his adolescent years in Japan, then returned 1939 to Chicago to study architecture.
Two times he took photographs from the Villa Katsura, a building that Prince Toshihito had started around 1620 at the Katsura River west of Tokyo, on a ground with a particularly good view of the moon.
In 1883 the villa became the property of the Emperor, and was restored in the 1980s. Its gardens extend over 50000 square metres.
The black and white photographs of 1960 are very impressive, almost as if nobody ever lived in the buildings, the three dimensions of a room are reduced to flat patterns. In 1983 Ishimoto Yasuhiro published coloured photos of Katsura with "all of the elements which had been omitted from the extremely purified photography of the 1960 volume" (Kuraishi Shino).
Ishimoto Yasuhiro himself asks:
"I suddenly began to realize that what I had previously sought as beauty was in fact nothing more than a reductive beauty. I sought the extreme where all surplus was completely avoided, and yet the extremely correct form that resulted - wasn't it a completely narrow amount that did not allow any additional baggage?"
A very interesting question. Photography is always a subjective way to see the world, it is an art - you think about your composition, you omit, you choose a special detail, a segment or angle -
in short: you create.
The great photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro died on 6th February 2012.
