Teikō Shiotani


Teikō Shiotani was a photographer whose work in and near Tottori in the late 1920s and early 1930s made him a major figure in Japanese pictorialism. As ideals and fashions in photography changed, his work was largely forgotten in postwar Japan until interest was reawakened by a 1975 book devoted to his work; he later became known outside Japan thanks to [|an exhibition] of Japanese photography that toured Europe from 1979 to 1982.

Life and career

Early life

Sadayoshi Shiotani was born in October 1899 in Akasaki, Tottori, to a family who owned a shipping agency. He was the eldest son of the sixth patriarch; the fifth, his grandfather, had held various important civic posts, and had some interest in photography.
As a young boy, Shiotani enjoyed drawing and was good at it. When he was 12 or 13, he received a camera. Equipped with a simple meniscus lens, this folding camera used 127 film, a small format for the time, and was marketed as sufficiently compact to fit in a vest pocket. It was popular in Japan, where it was familiarly referred to as a besutan, and the photographers using it as besutan-ha. When Shiotani was 14, he participated in a photography event at Karo harbour in Tottori.
From 1912, Shiotani attended . Powerfully built, he did well at judo. He graduated in 1917, whereupon he became serious about photography. Like other users of the Vest Pocket Kodak, the teenage Shiotani was embarrassed when serious amateur photographers saw him using it; he soon supplemented it with a large format camera with a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.
Shiotani's fellow photographers would in 1919 form the Kōei Club, with over two hundred members. Shiotani's first known attendance in a Kōei meeting was in 1921, and photographs of his appeared in its magazine Kōei from 1922. Hokutō Saigō, the key figure in Kōei, greatly encouraged Shiotani.
Shiotani became an enthusiastic user of the Vest Pocket Kodak, and in 1919 set up the "Vest Club" in Akasaki, with 88 members. Perhaps thanks to his grandfather, he was freed from a career in the family shipping business and instead allowed to pursue photography.
Many Japanese amateur photographers of the time prized a painterly effect over detail – not necessarily Western-style painting, but often Japanese, and particularly of a. The aim was geijutsu shashin, which, depending on context, could be translated as "art photography", "artistic photography", "salon photography" or "pictorialist photography". The meniscus lens of the Vest Pocket Kodak did not permit detail, and photographers using it – notably Masataka Takayama,,, Mitsugi Arima and Kōyō Yasumoto – would often remove an aperture limiter from around its lens, thereby not only increasing the aperture by about two stops but also greatly softening the focus. Shiotani was attracted by the misty results and their resemblance to the works of a painter from Tottori whom he respected highly,.
In 1922, Shiotani married Sadako Inoue. They would have three sons, Sōnosuke, Reiji and Makoto ; and two daughters, Yūko and Yōko.

Prominence

Shiotani's earliest known appearance in a major magazine was his Still life, among contest winners in the January 1925 issue of '. His Shadow appeared in the March 1925 issue of Camera. As editor of both magazines, realized that Shiotani was unusually talented.
In August 1925, Shiotani and four other photographers made a trip around the coasts of Shimane Prefecture: Kaka, Konami, Shichirui, Mihonoseki, and particularly. Much later, Shiotani told Shōji Ueda:
We took photographs for three days and I thought we would die. . . . During that trip we didn't encounter a single woman. There were no inns; we just wrapped ourselves in straw mats and kept on walking. Finally we managed to get some curry and rice with duck eggs and it was delicious.

Despite these hardships, a number of photographs Shiotani took on the trip soon appeared in magazines. His Bird's-Eye View of a Village was published in the March 1926 issue of Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyū. It was influenced by Picasso and Braque's paintings from L'Estaque, and also Maeta's paintings of Paris. In 1926, he won the first prize in the first contest ever run by Asahi Camera, with Fishing Village, a photograph of Takohana.
From 1925 to 1927, Shiotani was also one of the key members of a group of photographers that in 1928 would formally become the Japan Photography Association. A successor to the Japan Photographic Art Association, this published a magazine and an annual, and held meetings and exhibitions. It was open to expressive distortions made with the camera, in the darkroom, or to the print: in addition to removing the aperture limiter from around the lens of a Vest Pocket Kodak, this might include deforming the printing paper under the enlarger, wiping prints with darker oil, and selectively removing this or adding powder to lighten areas. The work of Shiotani and the three other key members – Yamamoto, Takayama and Watanabe – was highly regarded by Nakajima, whose publications made their work well known.
From the mid-1920s, and often under one pseudonym or another, Shiotani's photographs frequently appeared in four Japanese photography magazines: Asahi Camera, Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyū, Camera and '. All four were new, championing the new trends in art photography whose major proponents were Tetsusuke Akiyama of the and Kōrō Kometani of the, both with "a style reminiscent of academic painting"; Shinzō Fukuhara of the Japan Photographic Society, with "light and its harmony", with avant-garde techniques drawn from painting – four photographers who were also among the judges of the magazines' contests. Shiotani became a leading figure in photography in the San'in region, and known nationwide: although Tottori had the lowest population of any of Japan's 47 prefectures, it was influential; in 1927 it had the fifth largest number of members of photography organizations, behind only Tokyo, Osaka, Hyōgo and Kyoto.
Tomoko Takeuji identifies the 1929 photograph Boy Priest Sitting as the point at which Shiotani matured as a photographer. This was published as a contest winner in the September 1929 issue of Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyū, where Kenkichi Nakajima praised it for its lack of gimmickry and for its calm. Both Kometani and the younger photographer Eiichi Sakurai also praised it. The photograph shows the then 15-year-old priest Kōsen Daigaku, who had been at the Sōtō temple Kaizō-ji, near Shiotani's house, for less than a year; he was very lonely there but his dignity led Shiotani to make many portraits of him. Shiotani also photographed the other child priests and the chief priest at the temple, of which Shiotani was the chief parishioner.
Shiotani attributed his new appreciation of religious motifs to the death in infancy of his second son, Reiji. As well as photographing people at the temple, he took many photographs of his first son, Sōnosuke, and his daughter, Yūko. As he emerged from mourning, Shiotani enjoyed and depicted their vitality and naïve innocence.
Shiotani lived his whole life in the family house in Akasaki, which is on the sea; the upstairs room provided an excellent view of the sea, and Shiotani took many photographs of it from his window. He was fascinated by the sea's changeability, and his subject matter expanded from everyday life to the power of nature. Takeuji and Noriko Tsutatani both single out Shipwreck as a powerful seascape. Takeuji points out that it is very different from the "nostalgic landscape photography" popular at the time, but that its depiction of the wrecked ship and its horrified spectators also avoids expressing emotion and instead shows natural forces at work.
Shiotani calculated that his photography from 1915 to 1935 had added up in the following way: still lifes, 2.5 ; human figures, 2.8; scenery, 3.6; animals, 1.1. On various occasions he wrote of both the importance to him of nature photography, and the childishness of evaluating the landscapes that one sees. Also, that merely showing the exterior of "a piece of grass or a tree" was insufficient, and that the photographer "should attempt to capture the inner life hidden in its nature and to express it".
One of Shiotani's better-known photographs is View with Weather Forecast of 1931. According to Shiotani's own account, he took the original photograph from his window, using his Vest Pocket Kodak. He trimmed it, and held the photographic paper curved during exposure under the enlarger, "rendering the feeling of that day of hard winds and stressing my first impression by the deformation of the curve". This exaggerated the convexity of the horizon, but Shiotani's manipulations continued: he bleached part of the sky area to emphasize the clouds, applied soot and oils to darken areas, and used an ink eraser to emphasize the white of the waves. The photograph was submitted for a contest in the January 1932 issue of The Photo-Times; it won first prize, but only after the magazine's critic, Sakae Tamura, had said that it was unsatisfactory as submitted and had had its left and right edges trimmed.
View with Weather Forecast is not unusual in Shiotani's oeuvre in its altered proportions. View with a Tunnel of 1930 is known both with horizontal compression and without. Although it has a "pastoral atmosphere" without the compression, one has "a sense of unease" when viewing the compressed version. Alterations such as those used by Shiotani were widely used by the Surrealists for an effect of dépaysement, and Takeuji surmises from this and from Shiotani's occasional photography of cemeteries and human bones that he may have been an early exponent of Surrealism in Japanese photography, although Surrealism in the visual arts was little known in Japan until later and the degree of Shiotani's awareness of Surrealist trends overseas is unknown.
Shiotani regarded himself as lucky to live in the provincial area of San'in, with its sea, sand dunes, rivers, Mt. Daisen and. Moreover, it had become an area of photographic excellence and experimentation. Younger photographers from the area followed in Shiotani's footsteps: most notably Yasuo Iwasa, and a little later Shōji Ueda, who would go on to enjoy great success. Among the legends about Shiotani was that he was such a perfectionist that retouching just two square centimetres of a print could occupy him for a whole day. Ueda stated that Shiotani's rate of success in contests and his skills made him something like a god.

Withdrawal

Shiotani gradually reduced his participation in photography at the national level during the 1930s. The last appearances of his photographs in Asahi Camera and The Photo-Times were in the October 1932 and June 1934 issues respectively. A series of twelve articles by him on techniques for The Photo-Times ended in September 1935. Takeuji surmises that this gradual withdrawal was because his geijutsu photography was becoming eclipsed by the newer trend of more expressly modernist. In the mid 30s, Shiotani returned to photographs he had taken from 1923 to 1925, printing them with less detail than previously, for an abstract and dreamlike effect. A notable example is Bird's-Eye View of a Village of 1934.
In 1938, the Vest Club was renamed Shakenkai, and Shiotani continued to participate in it. After the war, Shiotani opened a photo studio next to his house and also continued photographing for his own interest, remaining faithful to his earlier subject matter but making rather larger prints than before and avoiding darkroom manipulation and retouching. He participated in some local exhibitions, but also submitted his prints to the exhibitions in Tokyo of the art organization Shinkyō.

Later years

The emphasis by postwar Japanese photography publishing on the documentary rendered outmoded geijutsu photography as had been practised by Shiotani. However, a 1968 exhibition of the first hundred years of Japanese photography "effectuated a great turning point in how photography was understood and established a comprehensive canon of photographers, thereby rewriting the history of Japanese photography": although it included no photograph by Shiotani, it did display 56 examples of geijutsu photography of the period.
Shiotani was hospitalized from December 1974 to March 1975. The following month he had a one-man exhibition, Album 1923–1973, in the Asahi Pentax Gallery in Tokyo. If the 1968 exhibition had revived public interest in pictorialist photography, then the book Album 1923–1973, published in the autumn of 1975 and the first book devoted to Shiotani, made his photography widely known again, as well as prompting its acquisition by several museums. Edited by Shiotani's great admirer Shōji Ueda and printed and published in Yonago, this would later be one of only four books of pre-1945 photography to be profiled in and Ivan Vartanian's survey Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s.
During a visit to Japan in 1978, Lorenzo Merlo, head of the Canon Amsterdam gallery, encountered Album 1923–1973; the book so impressed him that Shiotani was included among "Eight Masters of the Twentieth Century" in an exhibition that was first shown in Bologna in 1979 and that subsequently travelled around Europe. During a visit to Japan in 1981, Manfred Heiting, who was planning photography exhibitions for Photokina, visited Shiotani in Akasaki; the next year, Shiotani exhibited, with 17 others, in Fotografie 1922–1982, held as part of Photokina. Curated by Heiting and described by the reviewer for Popular Photography as "the pièce de résistance of the picture shows, without a doubt" and a "magnificent exhibition", this presented Shiotani, Eliot Porter and Jean Dieuzaide as three exponents of the Pencil of Nature. Susumu Shiotani accepted a crystal obelisk at Photokina on his grandfather's behalf.
The Photokina show led to publication in the magazines Camera Arts and . Shiotani's inclusion in Photofest 1988 led to a solo exhibition that toured seven US cities until 1990.
From 1973 to 1983, Shiotani often contributed to 's quarterly magazine Kōdai.
The Vest Pocket Kodak and large-format camera were not the only cameras Shiotani used – in 1975, he wrote that he was still using the former but also a Piccolette and a Rolleicord – but in his eighties he continued to use the lens of the Vest Pocket Kodak, attached to a Pentax Spotmatic 35 mm camera.
Shiotani said to his fellow photographers:
You have to look for beauty close to hand. It is important that you find beauty in ordinary, daily life; there is no need to travel long distances to photograph. Subjects exist all around you. You must sharpen your sensitivity and discover the beauty in your local environment.

Shiotani died on 28 October 1988.

Legacy

In 2014, hundreds of prints from the Shiotani family's collection, and many other related materials, were donated to the Shimane Art Museum. According to the chief curator of the museum, "His work been meticulously preserved for eighty years, this miraculous collection remaining in perfect condition." The Tottori Prefectural Museum also has a large number of his prints. To date, six books largely or completely devoted to his work have been published in Japan.
In April of the same year, the opened in a building of the Shiotani family's in Akasaki. It is run by an NPO, the Shiotani Teikō Photo Project. Constructed in 1874, this two-storey building was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in November 2017.

Awards

Solo exhibitions

The list is selective, and omits mention of any of the exhibitions between 1926 and 1940. The chronologies provided in the 21st-century books about Shiotani give details.

Books largely devoted to Shiotani

A selective list, in chronological order: