The word “surrealist” crops up a lot with reference to the great Japanese photographer Shōji Ueda. It is not hard to see why. He is best known for his series Sand Dunes, in which he posed children and adults in the dunes near his home and photographed them as if they were movable pieces in a giant film set.
He often appears in the series as a kind of clownish director, either alone or with his wife. This is photography about directorial control, and the black and white shots are stills from a film that only ever happened in Ueda’s head.
Now comes an illuminating retrospective book which sets that body of work in the context of his many lesser-known series. (When Ueda died in 2000, he left a huge archive of unpublished material. For this book, the publishers were allowed access to 5,000 prints.) It shows Ueda as a singular figure in Japanese photography, an artist who seems to have gone his own sweet way as if oblivious to the iconoclastic developments of the 1960s, such as the politically radical Provoke movement.
It is an astonishing book, from the quality of the paper to the strange short story by Toshiyuki Horie, Under the Old Lens God, which is an oblique but fitting response to the images. The blurb describes Ueda as “a sedentary adventurer”, referring to the fact that the dunes he returned to again and again were close to his home in Totorri on the coast of Japan. He photographed there in cloud, sun and snow, drawn to its austere beauty and perhaps how its sense of space could be used to highlight the human form. There are other striking backdrops here, too: a cloaked figure is silhouetted against snow-covered stone steps like a monk from medieval times; young girls peer out of fisherman’s shacks dwarfed by a brooding sky; two large branches seem to hover above a bonfire in the snow surrounded by a crowd of villagers.
He is drawn to the stark silhouettes of people against dark backdrops and to portraits that are both playful and meticulously composed – a boy holding a toy pistol, a young girl blowing a chewing gum bubble. Ordinary life is recorded, too, in images of schoolchildren mimicking the stretching exercises of their teacher and in an extraordinary shot of a girl pushing a young child on a bicycle across a wide road – they appear almost as cut-out shadows in motion.
While there are glimpses of the Ueda we know, much of the work here is surprising, not least the various still lives which are characterised by rich colours and a playfulness that is pure Ueda. Peanut shells are painted red and blue at their tips and arranged in a line like tiny socks. A pomegranate is halved and shot inside and out, its shiny skin contrasting with the fleshy pulp and embedded seeds. Small unripe cherries sit in a blue bowl on a deeper blue backdrop, while a tiny outstretched hand appears at the edge of the frame. These images, from a series called Genshi Yukan (Illusion) 1987-1992, are so surprising they could almost be the work of another photographer.
Likewise the impressionistic colour series, Shiroi Kaze (Brilliant Scenes) 1980-1981, in which people and the landscapes they appear in are slightly blurred and their colours faded as if they belong to another time. In one startling shot, the ghostly outline of a single electricity pylon arises out of a wash of muted yellow into a grey sky. It resembles a watercolour painting as much as a photograph. It is as if, in old age, Ueda saw the world anew – mysterious and luminous, but fading from his sight.
Elsewhere, the more familiar black and white images add up to a signature of sorts, both breathtaking and serene in the ordered world they evoke.
This, then, is a book of beautiful surprises. It traces the creative arc of a life lived on the periphery, but one infused with an instinctive poetic understanding of the slow rhythms of everyday life.
As a colourist, too, Ueda comes close to Saul Leiter’s painterly vision – there is the same understanding of tone and depth, of things viewed as if through the transforming gauze of the lens. You would be hard pushed to find a more beautiful photography book this year, or one that gives such a sense of an instinctively gifted individual pursuing his own creative journey in a singular and surprising way.
- Shōji Ueda is available now.
