Sakyu: La Mode Shoji Ueda

*Available only in Europe

A compact volume (Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2016) gathering only the fashion photographs of Shoji Ueda, the master who forged the avant-garde staged style known as 'Ueda-cho' on the Tottori sand dunes. It collects some seventy advertising and mode images — black-and-white and color — made from his late period in the 1980s–90s. Against a stage of sand, sky, and sea reduced to near-abstraction, figures are arranged like objects, lending the pictures a poetic, Surrealist buoyancy. From a photographer who called himself a lifelong amateur yet won international acclaim, the book distills Ueda's playfulness and formal rigor, closing with a guide to the Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography in his native Tottori.