Ueda Shoji

Place: Tottori

Born: 1913

Death: 2000

Biography:

Ueda Shoji was a Japanese photographer born in Tottori, Japan in 1913. He is best known for his distinctive, dreamlike black-and-white images with staged figures, taken on the Tottori sand dunes. Ueda began using posed figures and objects in his photographs in 1939, but was forced to cease his production due to Japan's participation in World War II. His surreal Sand Dune series, of which the first images were published 1949, was overshadowed by the predominance of social realism in Japanese post-war photography. His oeuvre was reconsidered by critics in 1971 after the publication of the widely-appreciated photobook Warabe Goyomi (Children the Year Round), containing images of children which masterfully balanced social realism and the playfulness of Ueda's posed pictures. Since the 1970s, his work has won him international renown, and in 1995 the Ueda Shōji Museum of Photography was inaugurated. Ueda remained deeply attached to his native San'in region, and in particular his hometown of Sakaiminato, throughout his entire life. He died in 2000.