it more heavily later in his career. During his second stay in Chicago, Ishimoto began experimenting with multiple exposures in color film, overlapping silhouettes with colored filters to create abstracted, transparent forms that were subject to the whims of photographic chance and inevitability. These techniques were later utilized in his series Color and Form (Iro to Katachi) (2003), an examination of the sensuous and abstracted forms of various types of flora. In "Food Journal/Wrapped Foods" (Shokumotsushi/Tsutsumareta shokumotsu) (1984), Ishimoto photographed everyday food items from the supermarket, accentuating the strangeness of fish and vegetables stretching against plastic wrap and styrofoam by highlighting the intense chromatic qualities of his subjects against stark black backgrounds, and casting them in a blue-green tone that recalled the clinical appearance of x-ray radiographs . 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. Mandalas of the Two Worlds (1976) In 1973, he photographed hundreds of Buddhist deities depicted in the Mandalas of the Two Worlds (Ryōkai Mandala) preserved inside the Tō-ji temple (also known as Kyō-ō-gokoku-ji) in Kyoto. By using color film and flash, Ishimoto captured the vibrant tones and intricate details of works that were typically kept in darkness for conservation purposes. His experience photographing the mandalas intensified his interests in the presence of tradition in contemporary life, and played a part in shifting his earlier penchant for "subtractive" beauty (reflected in his austere photographs of Katsura) towards an aesthetic mode that embraced the seemingly contradictory forces of the world and instead read them as co-constitutive and mutually interdependent—a way of thought shaped by the tenets of esoteric Buddhism Ishimoto expressed the following reflections on the mandalas' effect on his attitude towards photographic vision: “Photographers tend to pick up the good things and push everything else out of the frame. But with the mandala Buddhas, the mandalas boldly affirm the lowly elements of human existence instead of excising them when attempting to achieve enlightenment. Instead of cutting out the bad things, I came to think that the framed space instead needed to be a condensed version of everything.” The photographs were published by Heibonsha in 1977 as a special boxed