From the Hip

“From the Hip” traces the 40-year career of Japanese photographer Yoshihiko Ueda over almost 700 pages of photographs. Featuring some of his earliest work, including the previously unpublished Quinault series about the sacred forests of Native Americans, as well as recent series, “From the Hip” reflects the full wealth and depth of Ueda’s photographic journey. Each photograph, framed by the white margins of the page and accompanied by a short caption, presents private and commercial work, portraits and product shots, primal landscapes and urban sceneries, celebrities and portraits of ordinary people, with the extent of genres, styles, projects, and themes almost too varied to list in full. Throughout the book, Ueda shares anecdotes about individual shoots, short musings, and his personal philosophy of photography, with essays by Minoru Shimizu and Yuichiroh Takashima exploring Ueda’s photography in more detail. All texts are included in Japanese and English translation.

“To Yoshihiko Ueda, ‘things as they are’ does not mean reduction or simplification to the barest essence of what exists, the singularity of a given ‘this’ or ‘that.’ Instead, it represents the randomness of a world ultimately governed by forces, whether they be flows of capital or advertising trends […] In this random world, there can be no singularity, and no single moment. Surrendering to such a world and capturing its moments of grace, its serendipities, chance encounters, circumstances and destinies shaped by coincidence: this is the journey of Yoshihiko Ueda, an artist of both abandonment and aspiration.”
― from Minoru Shimizu’s essay “Abandonment and Aspiration: The Journey of Yoshihiko Ueda”