A Tale of Two Cities Yasuhiro Ishimoto The Art Institute of Chicago/1999/Japanese/243*268*15 A Tale of Two Cities is a collection of photographs by Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto, born in San Francisco in 1921, lived in Kochi from 1924 to 1939 and moved to the USA on his own. After studying architecture at Northwestern University in Chicago, he graduated in 1952 from the photography department of the Institute of Design (known as the New Bauhaus, which merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949). After returning to Japan, he stayed in Chicago again from 1958 to 1961, and in 1969 published Chicago, Chicago, a collection of photographs taken during his two stays, one as a student and one after graduation, which is still highly regarded as a masterpiece in the history of Japanese photography. This book was published in 1999 to accompany Ishimoto's photographic exhibition ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ at the Art Institute of Chicago. It consists of photographs taken in Chicago and Tokyo (and partly in Kyoto), with the first half of the book showing similar works taken in the two cities side by side, the middle section showing the city of Chicago in the same period as ‘Chicago, Chicago’, and the last part a compilation of Tokyo photographs taken between the 1950s and the 1990s.