Shoji Ueda, Beyond the Dunes

Following his death in 2000, Shoji Ueda has been regularly associated with his series Sand Dune, developed during the 1950s. However, it is worth noting that his oeuvre is much vaster than just this one body of work. A second monograph, published by Chose Commune in 2016 is testimony to just this. The work covers 5000 original photographs conserved by the photographer’s grandson Yutaka Masutani, a number of which have never been seen before.

Born in 1913 in Tottori, Shoji Ueda never left this region, the least populated of Japan. The son of an artisan who specialised in geta, traditional Japanese sandals and wooden shoes, in 1930 he received a camera as a birthday gift. He took retirement between 1941 and 1947 in order to avoid being drafted as a military photographer. His style and the uniqueness of his images are characterised by the term ‘Ueda-cho’. A museum has since been dedicated to the photographer in his home town.

Little-known colour work

An admirer of Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Magritte, Shoji Ueda would often stage his wife and three children in absurd manners. A fan of black-and-white photography for the mysteries it contained, he nevertheless experimented with colour in some of his lesser-known works. The artist would develop still lives, staging seasonal fruit and day-to-day objects, breathing life and poetry into a wind-ravaged field or immortalising a young girl stood waiting with her back to the wall. This publication takes a new look at the photographer’s work, showing him to be a settled adventurer whose photographs should be read within the historical context of post-World War Two, of a banality that should be both appreciated and savoured.

The collected photographs were taken between 1935 and 1992. For the publication, Chose Commune gave writer Toshiyuki Horie carte blanche to develop a fictional text that would match the unique world of Shoji Ueda’s photography.

Shoji Ueda – Second edition (2016), is a photo book by Shoji Ueda and is published by Chose Commune.