Yoshihiko Ueda - From the Hip

Yoshihiko Ueda
From the Hip

Published by Akaaka, 2025
Size: 18.8 x 21 cm
768 pages
Hardcover
Languages: English, Japanese
First edition accompanied by a signed postcard

"From the Hip" traces the forty-year career of Japanese photographer Yoshihiko Ueda through nearly 700 pages of photographs. Featuring some of his earliest works, including the previously unpublished Quinault series on Native American sacred forests, as well as more recent series, "From the Hip" reflects the full richness and depth of Ueda's photographic journey. Each photograph, framed by the white margins of the page and accompanied by a short caption, presents personal and commercial work, portraits and product shots, primal landscapes and urban scenes, portraits of celebrities and ordinary people, with a variety of genres, styles, projects, and themes almost too vast to list. Throughout the book, Ueda shares anecdotes about individual photo shoots, brief reflections, and his personal philosophy of photography, while essays by Minoru Shimizu and Yuichiroh Takashima explore Ueda's photography in greater detail. All texts are included in Japanese and English.

For Yoshihiko Ueda, “things as they are” does not mean a reduction or simplification to the very essence of what exists, to the singularity of a given “this” or “that.” Rather, it represents the randomness of a world fundamentally governed by forces, whether capital flows or advertising trends. […] In this random world, there can be no singularity, no unique moment. To let oneself be carried along by such a world and to seize its moments of grace, its serendipities, its chance encounters, the circumstances and destinies shaped by chance: this is the path of Yoshihiko Ueda, an artist of surrender and aspiration.
– Excerpt from Minoru Shimizu's essay, "Abandonment and Aspiration: The Journey of Yoshihiko Ueda"