exhibition "Japanese Exhibition House." It was during this trip that Ishimoto visited the Katsura Imperial Villa (Katsura rikyū) in Kyoto for the first time. 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. Designed and constructed over a fifty-year period under the auspices of Prince Toshihito and Prince Toshitada of the Hachijō-no-miya family, the villa complex consists of a series of aristocratic dwellings built in the shoin style, along with four tea-ceremony houses built in the sukiya style, and a Buddhist hall surrounded by a lavish and carefully curated garden. Architect Arata Isozaki described the complex as an "assemblage" of layered styles and varied construction methods, which made it a source of great intrigue and inspiration for architects throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Ishimoto returned to Katsura the following year, and was granted permission by the imperial household to photograph the site for the full month of May, between the designated hours of 9:00 a.m and 4:30 p.m. His access to the codified space (considering the little time that had elapsed since the American occupation of Japan) was made possible in part due to his American passport. Many of the images Ishimoto took using his 4x5 Linhof, he recalled, were shot on an up-to-date format that was not widely recognized in postwar Japan, leading to many of the negatives becoming ruined during the development process. 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. Ishimoto honed in on structural and environmental details instead of capturing more conventional views of the architecture and garden as a whole. His black-and-white images reveal the strong orthographic formalisms of the shoji and fusuma sliding doors, delicate interplays between light and shadow, the textural impressions of the wooden beams, moss, bamboo, and other natural elements, and the curated naturalism of features such as the stepping stones in the garden, which were aligned to be ever so slightly askew. The stones were a particularly arresting visual feature for Ishimoto, who expressed being in