Ueda Shoji
Untitled

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Images(4)

Artist Ueda ShojiJapanese, 1913–2000

CultureJapanese

Titles

Untitled
from the series Tottori Sand Dunes

Date1950

PlaceJapan

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 9 1/8 × 9 in. (23.1 × 22.9 cm)
Sheet: 11 9/16 × 10 3/4 in. (29.4 × 27.3 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Morris Weiner, The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2002.2489

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionShoji Ueda worked outside the mainstream photography movements of postwar Japan, developing a style of staged photography that balanced a distinctive mix of lyricism and humor with compositional strength. After studying photography in Tokyo, he returned to the sparsely developed, rugged coast of his native Tottori Prefecture, where he spent the rest of his career expressing a regional sensibility removed from the dominant trend of documentary photography. In a series of photographs taken in the extensive Tottori sand dunes, Ueda scattered his family members (posing as models) across the stark backdrop in haphazard groupings that verge on the surreal. The sense of dreamlike ambiguity is heightened by an uneven horizon, as the dunes roll beneath a cloud-filled sky.
Provenance[Manfred Heiting, Malibu, California]; purchased by MFAH, 2002.
Exhibition HistoryExhibited in "Japanese Photography in the Manfred Heiting Collection" at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, March 11- July 13, 2003.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

There is an inscription in pencil, verso of sheet, lower right, in Japanese.

verso lower right a stamp in red-artist's chop ?

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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