silkscreen company Color Graphics (another skill he had picked up in the camps). In 1946, he entered Northwestern University to study architecture. Though he dropped out shortly after enrolling, architecture would hold an important place in his photographic practice. The following year, Ishimoto joined the Fort Dearborn Camera Club through the introduction of Japanese-American photographer Harry K. Shigeta, who co-founded the organization in 1924. Many of the club members still adhered to the late 19th-, early 20th century conventions of pictorialism, which sought to replicate the painterly qualities of pictorial art through photography. At the same time, Ishimoto encountered avant-garde publications such as György Kepes' The Language of Vision and László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, both of which had a profound impact on Ishimoto's thinking on the perceptual dimensions of the visual world and the structural qualities of the built and natural environments. Institute of Design (1948-52) In 1948, with the encouragement of Shigeta, Ishimoto enrolled in the Institute of Design (ID) of the Illinois Institute of Technology, otherwise known as the "New Bauhaus." Founded by Moholy-Nagy in 1937, the school brought the pedagogical spirit of the Bauhaus to Chicago through its similar foundational interdisciplinary course and orientation towards human-centric design. 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). In his teaching, Moholy-Nagy encouraged students to treat light as a "raw material," subject to experimentation and manipulation through carefully calibrated engagements with chemicals, atmospheric conditions, surfaces, camera settings, and spatial arrangements—an orientation that would percolate into Ishimoto's deliberate and meticulous arrangements of light and form in his architectural photographs. Ishimoto studied with photographers such as Aaron Siskind, Gordon Coster, and Harry M. Callahan. In comparison to his fellow instructors, Callahan was less interested in the theoretical dimensions of photography, and instead encouraged his students to go out into the city and take a more freeform approach to photographing whatever interested them most. While at the ID, Ishimoto struck up a lasting friendship with fellow student Marvin E. Newman. 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. Ishimoto's time at the ID instilled in him a range of technical and artistic ways