List of photobooks by photographer Ueda, Shoji

Shōji Ueda (b. 1913 in Sakaiminato - 2000) is a Japanese photographer from the Tottori region. First interested in painting, he discovered photography around 1928. His father, a shoemaker, offered him a Vest-Pocket Kodak for his 16th birthday. In 1932, he studied photography at the Oriental School of Photography in Tokyo.

In the 1930s, he began his career with the group of photographers Chūgoku Shashinka Shūdan with fellow photographers Ryōsuke Ishizu, Kunio Masaoka and Akira Nomura. His best-known work is part of the Dune Landscapes series featuring various characters in the outdoor settings of the dunes in his home region.

Far from Tokyo's artistic centers, Ueda is developing a work that is unclassifiable because it is at the same time outside of any movement inscribed in the history of photography, and inspired by mixed European and Japanese cultures. His style is marginal in relation to documentary trends in Europe at this time.

If his first photographs are pictorialist, he quickly takes the taste of experimentation, and mixes natural patterns and graphic effects, breaking with the first impression of instantaneity: "I like that we can feel the slight intervention of the photographer ".

His photographs have won awards in numerous competitions and have been published in the magazines Camera, Asahi Camera, Nippon Camera ... He also exhibited, notably in Osaka, Tokyo, in 1953, and at the MoMA in New York at the invitation of Edward Steichen in 1971.

He was also a professor from 1975 to 1994 at Kyushu Sangyo University in Fukuoka. Deceased on July 4, 2000 at the age of 87, Ueda is now considered one of the most brilliant photographers of his century in Japan.