Born in 1921 in San Francisco, into a family of Japanese farmers, Yasuhiro Ishimoto arrived in Japan at the age of three and grew up on the island of Shikoku. After graduating in agronomy, he returned to the United States in 1939 to study architecture. Held captive in an internment camp during the Second World War, Ishimoto returned to Chicago in 1948 and joined the Photography Department of the Institute of Design. He studied with Harry M. Callahan and Aaron Siskind, both of whom were pioneers of a new formal and expressive approach to photography. Five years later, Ishimoto returned to Japan, where he was commissioned by MoMA in New York to produce a series on the Imperial Villa of Katsura, Kyoto, which resulted in the famous publication Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960). 
His work has been exhibited in prestigious international museums, including MoMA in New York (1974), the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo (1977), the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (1998), the Art Institute in Chicago (1999) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (2010). Ishimoto published three iconic publications: Someday Somewhere (1958), Katsura (1960) and Chicago Chicago (1969). He died in 2012, and the Ishimoto Yasuhiro Photo Center was created the following year within the Museum of Art, Kochi, to preserve his archives and pay tribute to his work.