By Fred Camper
On a recent afternoon the two men sat in the Daiter Gallery discussing their work and the years they spent together in the city. Asked to articulate the difference between their styles, Ishimoto says he can’t, then says it stems from their different personalities. “I myself am not trying to do it differently,” he says, “but it happens.”
When Ishimoto was 17 his parents sent him back to the U.S. to study agriculture. Their farm, like most Japanese farms, was small, but they hoped someday he might manage a large farm in China, which Japan had invaded. But before he completed his studies, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. Ishimoto was sent to an internment camp in California, then transferred to another camp in Colorado, where he spent most of the war. “If I say it this way a lot of Japanese won’t like it,” he says, “but I was enjoying it. I had nothing to lose. I was young, they fed us pretty good food, I had a lot of time to myself. If you worked at plain labor you got, I think, $12 a month. If you had a little bit of skill you got $16 per month. Doctors, teachers, or firemen all got $19 a month. This was the highest, so I started working as a fireman. You were in the station for 24 hours, then spent 24 hours doing nothing. But in the camp there were no fires, nothing to do–always a holiday. Later there was a silk-screen shop in the camp, and I learned how to make prints.
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He was released from the camp in 1944 and wanted to go to New York to study, but because he’d received military training in his high school in Japan–as had every other student–he was banned from living on either coast. Chicago was the next largest city and it was “on the way to New York,” so he came here. He quickly found work in a silk-screen shop that made posters for Bell Telephone and other companies. The money was good, about $600 a month.
Newman too had been influenced by an aesthetic very different from that prevailing at the Institute of Design–the socially conscious uses of photography advocated at the Photo League in New York, to which he’d belonged briefly in the late 40s. Born in New York City in 1927 to a family of Russian Jews who’d been in the bakery business for four generations, Newman was the only son and was expected to continue the tradition. His political consciousness was formed during the first years of the Depression, when he remembers his family, enthusiastic Roosevelt supporters, discussing how tight money was and the cutbacks they were forced to make in their business. He also recalls, “Discrimination against the Jews and anti-Semitism was part of my upbringing.”
After he got his degree, Newman spent part of the summer before he was to start as a graduate student in product design at the Institute of Design hitchhiking across the country. When he got back to New York his father told him he couldn’t pay his tuition because he had to pay for Newman’s younger sister’s wedding. His father thought he would stay in New York and work in the bakery. “I just said good-bye and hitchhiked out to Chicago,” says Newman. “I told [school director Serge] Chermayeff what my problems were. He said to start school, and you’ll pay us when you get the money. I had to find a job very quickly, and the first week I was here I started parking automobiles in a lot at Michigan and Delaware. It was a job where you could get tips and do well if you were very fast. There was a very affluent clientele in that area–tips could occasionally be as much as $5.” Later he would work for Hull-House, which used his photos in fund-raising brochures and slide presentations.
Hurtig thinks the approach to materials at the Institute of Design was quite different from that at the School of the Art Institute back then. For example, rather than trying to carve a piece of wood into a figure, students would be encouraged to ask questions about the nature of wood itself and the tools they might use to shape it. “We were to take the various power tools–table saws, all kinds of electrical tools–and consider the nature of the cuts each might make,” he says. “We weren’t trying to replicate an existing 17th-century form. We were trying to find out what was characteristic of that tool and how did that tool produce a certain kind of impact on the material? How could we shape materials consistent with the tool that we were working with?”
