Shōji Ueda

Shōji Ueda (植田 正治, Ueda Shōji, 1913–2000) was a photographer of Tottori, Japan, who combined surrealist compositional elements with realistic depiction. Most of the work for which Ueda is widely known was photographed within a strip of about 350 km running from Igumi (on the border of Tottori and Hyōgo) to Hagi (Yamaguchi).[1]

The photographs Ueda takes are so unique. And in France, the birthplace of photography, his work style referred to as the Ueda-cho. Ueda described himself as a mere amateur living in the countryside. Ueda did a lot of his work in his hometown of Tottori.

Ueda was born on 27 March 1913 in Sakai (now Sakaiminato), Tottori. His father was a manufacturer and seller of geta; Shōji was the only child who survived infancy. The boy received a camera from his father in 1930 and quickly became very involved in photography, submitting his photographs to magazines; his photograph Child on the Beach (浜の子供), Hama no kodomo) appeared in the December issue of Camera.

In 1930 Ueda formed the photographic group Chūgoku Shashinka Shūdan (中国写真家集団) with Ryōsuke Ishizu, Kunio Masaoka, and Akira Nomura (野村秋良); from 1932 till 1937 the group exhibited its works four times at Konishiroku Hall (小西六ホール, Konishiroku Hōru) in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Ueda studied at the Oriental School of Photography in Tokyo in 1932 and returned to Sakai, opening a studio, Ueda Shashinjō (植田写真場), when only nineteen.

Ueda married in 1935, and his wife helped him to run his photographic studio. His marriage was a happy one; his wife and their three children are recurring models in his works. Ueda was active as an amateur as well as a professional photographer, participating in various groups.

In 1941 Ueda gave up photography, not wanting to become a military photographer. (Toward the end of the war, he was forced to photograph the result of a fire.) He resumed shortly after the war, and in 1947 he joined the Tokyo-based group Ginryūsha.

Ueda found the sand dunes of Tottori excellent backdrops for single and group portraits, typically in square format and until relatively late all in black and white. In 1949, inspired by Kineo Kuwabara, then the editor of Camera, Ueda photographed the dunes with Ken Domon and Yōichi Midorikawa. Some of these have Domon as a model, far from his gruff image. The photographs were first published in the September and October 1949 issues of Camera and have been frequently anthologized. Ueda started photographing nudes on the dunes in 1951, and from 1970 he used them as the backdrop for fashion photography.

The postwar concentration on realism led by Domon, followed by the rejection of realism led by Shōmei Tōmatsu, sidelined Ueda's cool vision. Ueda participated in "Japanese Photography" at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1960 and had solo exhibitions in Japan, but had to wait till a 1974 retrospective held in the Nikon Salon in Tokyo and Osaka before his return to popularity.

Ueda remained based in Tottori, opening a studio and camera shop in Yonago in 1965, and in 1972 moving to a new three-storey building in Yonago: Ueda Camera on the first floor, the Charanka (茶蘭花) coffee shop on the second, and Gallery U on the third. The building served as a base for local photographic life.

From 1975 until 1994, Ueda was a professor at Kyushu Sangyo University.

Critical and popular recognition came from the mid seventies. A succession of book-length collections of new and old appeared. Ueda weathered the death in 1983 of his wife, and continued working well into the 1990s. He died of a heart attack on 4 July 2000.

The Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography (植田正治写真美術館 Ueda Shōji Shashin Bijutsukan), devoted to his works, opened in Kishimoto (now Hōki, near Yonago) Tottori Prefecture in 1995.

In 2015, a retrospective was published featuring previously unseen works. The publishers were given access to 5000 unpublished photos and includes a short story by [Toshiyuki Horie].[2]