The Artist's One Day School Visit Program is a program run by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo under which artists active on the front lines of the contemporary art scene visit Tokyo schools to give classes. Canon recently provided its own unique form of support to the program by lending digital camera equipment.

For the latest iteration of the program, artist Naoki Ishikawa visited Tokyo Metropolitan High School of Music & Fine Arts on two separate days, March 5 and March 25, 2010. Mr. Ishikawa is an avant-garde adventurer and photographer whose travels have taken him around the globe, including to the North and South Poles.

The first day featured a lecture and a question-and-answer session, after which Mr. Ishikawa assigned the students a photography project. On the second day the students brought in photos they had taken with compact digital cameras for evaluation by the artist himself.

Mr. Ishikawa's comments and observations made a tremendous impression on the students, all the more so because he is a practicing artist himself. And for us at Canon who offered support, it was a pleasure to be able to help aspiring young artists experience for themselves the world of photography in all its breadth and profundity.