A new publication by Chose Commune publishers is shedding fresh light on the lesser-known aspects of Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda's extensive body of work, deliberately avoiding his famous Sand Dunes series to explore the full breadth of his artistic vision. The book, curated by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi and Vasantha Yogananthan, presents a rare portrait of the unconventional artist based on their examination of 5,000 original prints over just three days.
Ueda is widely recognized for his surrealistic staged photographs in the sand dunes of his native Tottori region, which he began creating in the 1930s. These iconic images include children appearing off-balance, a strange self-portrait of himself wearing a bowler hat while holding a balloon on a string, and his wife in a kimono set against the desert landscape. However, critics often reduce his entire artistic legacy to this singular imagery.
The new editorial approach deliberately sidesteps this famous series, mentioning it only in passing to dive deeper into Ueda's marginalized, singular, and unclassifiable body of work that was marked by constant experimentation. Despite never aligning himself with any of the major movements that swept through Japanese photography, Ueda accumulated a very personal exploration of time, spatial composition, and even color through his various series.
The book's most surprising revelation lies in Ueda's use of color photography, particularly in his still-life compositions of fruits including pomegranates and peanuts. These works punctuate a volume organized by seasons, a project the photographer undertook following his wife's death. His approach was simultaneously contemplative, precise, and reminiscent of collage work, creating a reduced, immediate, and symbolic universe that was remarkably tense between apparent realism and a propensity for dreams that made blue and red-colored peanuts appear to float above seascapes.
In a completely different aesthetic approach, the book concludes with excerpts from Ueda's "Brilliant Scenes" series, where he employed a vibrant, mysterious, and luminous blur technique. This work echoed his childhood images thematically while creating a pictorialist aestheticization of the world that transformed tennis courts into paintings and made golden wheat stalks tremble in the wind. Few comparable examples exist of such exploration of color as material substance.
While children occupy a special place in his black and white work, the landscapes, cityscapes, and enigmatic framings lead viewers toward a poetry of everyday life that elegantly highlights his visual acuity. The photographer avoided systematization, instead choosing distances that seemed to match each situation perfectly, disrupting visual conventions through luminous stridencies or details that brought mystery to the mundane.
Unlike most Japanese photographers of his era, Ueda was not primarily a book publisher but was more connected to magazines and image distribution in publications aimed at amateur photographers. This volume, remarkably produced with different paper choices and graphic design decisions that remain appropriately subtle, opens up a new reading of this marginal photographer whose work cannot be reduced to major movements in Japanese or international photography.
The publication gives readers a desire to see a major Shoji Ueda exhibition that would go beyond the pleasure of following him through familiar dunes to question his creative process of inventing a transcendent universe from fragments of the most immediate daily life. The book was designed by Atelier Pentagon and features 188 pages with 90 color images in a trilingual format (English, French, Japanese), limited to 1,200 copies with a special edition of 30 boxed sets, each including one of three limited edition prints on quality paper, stamped and numbered on the reverse.
