To the editor In Stephen Longmire's omnibus feature article "Callahan's Children" in the September/October issue (Volume 28 no.

To the editor

In Stephen Longmire's omnibus feature article "Callahan's Children" in the September/October issue (Volume 28 no. 2) a coupling of questions are raised regarding my exhibition "Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of pair Cities" that I would like to clarify. Longmire is relate toed that the point of view in the selection and arrangement of the photographs was too a great deal of my own rather than Ishimoto's. That may be, moreover it is the way in which Ishimoto himself asked me to work.

When I went to Japan the first time in order to come together with Ishimoto about the scheme I said, "Show me your career as you behold it." But his reply was, "No, I want you to find it for yourself." I agreed that I would do my best to rise to that challenge if I could have access to his entire archive of his work, and across a period of two weeks I apply the minded at prints of around 4000 different negatives from which I eventually chose 250 to consider for the exhibition and donation at the Art Institute. From that initial meeting through the final selection of the work to be shown Ishimoto not ever intervened to direct or correct the selection proces nevertheless he did later offer us a other material of his be in possession of choosing. The same was authentic of the way we worked with Irving Penn

The sort of things that Longmire is pertain toed I may have slighted are in in the greatest degree cases professional commissions that came Ishimoto's way athwart the years, such as the volume on Islam or the documentation of the mandala. From looking at his photographs and discussing them with him during the three years leading up to the exhibition, I came to the conclusion that the really personal work that defined his career for Ishimoto himself was the road photography that he has done from before he come intoed the Institute of Design until the ready day. So that's where I placed the emphasis. I also felt that that was the best and mostly enduring work Ishimoto has done.

In addition, Longmire be warmeds that some sequences of pictures in my catalog "seem linked through no more than chance similarities." As an example he propounds a juxtaposition of a black child in Chicago playing with a shut up of concrete and a Tokyo road demonstration in which torn up chunk of pavement litter the foreground. There is nothing chance about this pairing. Longmire commentarys "Had Ishimoto paired these images himself, viewers might assume a narrative about social violence. As it is the analogy appear to bes incidental." He got the point about social violence, however why is it invalidated if the curator is the single who's making it?

Picture order of successions in catalogs are also essays, just like those written in words. in this way are the order in which the prints are hung forward a gallery wall. In this instance, it was remarkably much the purpose of the order of succession to point out how Ishimoto be attendanted to photograph the dispossessed and disaffected in the two of the societies where he has lived. In like manner, it was also oftentimes the purpose in the picture followings to bring out the way that certain graphic ideas informed a thinking principle of composition Ishimoto first learned at the Institute of Design and has been refining till doomsday since.

If Longmire had basic questions about these aspects of the exhibition and catalog, and what the couple represented concerning the relationship that Ishimoto's work has to my confess he could easily have asked either Ishimoto or me to answer of that kind questions before he wrote his essay.

Colin Westerbeck

Associate Curator

Department of Photography

The Art Institute of Chicago

Stephen Longmire responds:

Thanks to Colin Westerbeck for his answer to my article, and for his account of for what cause his retrospective of photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto's life's work came about. The curator and I did correspond as I was writing, and, as he knows, I inquired about who was responsible for the selection and sequencing of prints. I've since asked him to clarify what Ishimoto chose to give the Art Institute of Chicago of his admit accord, since I remain interested in learning to what degree the photographer sees his confess career, to the extent that is possible. That the supplemental gift was a appoint of prints, each from his take a view ofs of Katsura Villa and Ise shrine, confirms my sensation that this show--by the curator's confess admission--favored Ishimoto's early Chicago road photography over the broader affair with traditional cultures in rapid transition that his work also supports.

I am quite aware that a curator's presentation of an artist's career is just that: united eye's view of another. The critic adds to this time another eye to the mix, complicating, or enriching, matters further. Westerbeck should realize I do not design to his habit of ordering exhibits and their catalogs by striking juxtapositions upon principle, since I congratulated him in succession this very strategy in a review of his Irving Penn retrospective ("A Life in Pictures," Chicago Reader, January 23 1998) Perhaps I was too polite in the passage he cites. The pairing in question does not work for me regardless of whose it is. It risks reducing the make subordinate of social violence--an important individual for Ishimoto--to a matter of formal similarities. I left it unclear who was responsible: now we know.