His decades-long career explored expressions of modernist design in traditional architecture, the quiet anxieties of urban life in Tokyo and Chicago, and the camera's capacity to bring out the abstract in the everyday and seemingly concrete fixtures of the world around him.

[2] The book, which features accompanying essays by Kenzō Tange and Walter Gropius, was instrumental in stimulating the discourse surrounding modernism’s relationship to tradition in Japanese architecture.

[4]: 251 [6][7]: 25  Ishimoto and his fellow photographs used creative solutions to work through the technological limitations in the camp, recalling how his friend fashioned an enlarger from a ketchup container and the bellows from a folding camera.

[4]: 251  The War Relocation Authority had established its first resettlement office in Chicago, with the express goal of dispersing Japanese Americans from the west coast in order to weaken the strength of ethnic enclaves and diminish their allegiance to Japan.

Moholy-Nagy shifted the craft-based distinctions entrenched in the German institution, which served to enhance gendered perceptions and discrimination, and instead split the school into three departments—architecture, product design, and light workshop (advertising arts).

The two frequently explored and photographed the neighborhoods of Chicago together, and created a short film titled The Church on Maxwell Street, which took as its subject an African-American outdoor revival meeting.

[6] Ishimoto's time at the ID instilled in him a range of technical and artistic ways of seeing, from the Bauhaus attitudes of avant-garde experimentalism and engagement with geometric principles, to Siskind's documentary vision, to Callahan's more subjective, instinct-driven practice, all of which played a role in shaping his orientation towards photography in the decades to follow.

[11]: 26  The exhibition not only marked a new shift in the Japanese art world in terms of medium, but also participated in the production of post-occupation cultural discourse between the United States and Japan, within which Ishimoto was now fully immersed.

In October 1956, Ishimoto and his wife Kawamata Shigeru were married at the International House of Japan (Kokusai bunka kaikan), in a ceremony overseen by Sōfū Teshigahara and Kenzō Tange.

Struck by the seventeenth-century villa's resonance with the geometries and compositional structures he encountered in his New Bauhaus education, Ishimoto brought his photos to Kenzō Tange, who saw in them a similar capacity to deconstruct and depict in lucid detail the aspects of premodern design that he believed formed the foundation of postwar modernist architecture.

[15]: 186  The photographs thus emerged at a time of immense flux and cultural reinvention, with Ishimoto himself occupying a social and political threshold that enabled him with both physical access and a distinct visual perspective.

The stones were a particularly arresting visual feature for Ishimoto, who expressed being in awe of the fact that the did not merely indicate avenues of movement, but rather that "their placement is carefully thought out, in a sense [to accommodate] the angle for a certain way of walking, to psychologically guide people to other parts of the garden or the next building, to create an atmosphere.

Over the course of the editing process, however, Tange, who Ishimoto had invited to contribute an essay, eventually became the de facto editor and publicist of the book, taking on a prominent role in the selection, cropping, order, and arrangement of the images in ways that set forth his own ideas surrounding the dialectical forces of tradition and modernity inherent in the villa.

[11]: 35–37  Tange cropped and grouped images to emphasize the presence of modular units in both built and natural elements (often against the wishes of Ishimoto), and coordinated them against a white background to accentuate rectilinearity and suffuse the publication with a sense of rhythmic order.

[16]: 17  After receiving a commission from publisher Iwanami Shoten, Ishimoto revisited the site in November 1981 and February 1982, this time photographing the villa in both black-and-white and color using a Sinar camera with a variety of lenses.

[11]: 50  The second publication, for which Arata Isozaki provided substantial input and contributed an essay, featured images that were far more expansive in their framing, embraced ornamentation and chromatic diversity, and considered design details within their architectural contexts rather than highlighting them through isolation.

[7]: 34  Ishimoto's own experiences of facing anti-Japanese discrimination, both in the camps and Chicago, may also be read as informing his sensitivity towards the plight of disenfranchised communities, and his steadfast desire to immerse himself in the nooks and crannies of the urban landscape.

[7]: 96–97 Many of Ishimoto's early photos in Chicago focus on children across varied neighborhoods, capturing the reckless vigor of their play, their urban stomping grounds, and their unflinching, and at times impenetrable gazes towards the camera with a frankness that was neither sentimental nor sardonic.

[7]: 40 In December 1958, Ishimoto, whose Japanese visa was close to expiry, returned to Chicago with his wife Shigeru on a fellowship from camera maker Chiyoda Kōgaku Kōgyō (now Konica Minolta).

The book design was conducted by Yūsaku Kamekura, and the 210 images were printed using a duotone relief process, which provided a richness to the dark tones and shadows captured in his street shots.

[7]: 40–46  Ishimoto also immersed himself in allies and parades, and captured a dynamic image of Martin Luther King Jr. amidst an impassioned speech at a 1960 convention, flanked by a row of floating posters protesting against segregation in schools.

Instead of cutting out the bad things, I came to think that the framed space instead needed to be a condensed version of everything.”[4]: 117  The photographs were published by Heibonsha in 1977 as a special boxed collectors' edition titled The Mandalas of the Two Worlds: The Legend of Shingon-in, and featured in a traveling exhibition organized by the Seibu Museum of Art and designed by Ikko Tanaka.

[4][19] The series also calls attention to the rise of mass consumerism in 1980s Japan, and the anxieties that Ishimoto, as someone who grew up in a working-class family during an era of scarcity, felt with regards to the loss of distinctiveness and food safety that came in tandem with rapid industrial and commercial growth.