Teikō Shiotani (塩谷 定好, Shiotani Teikō; 24 October 1899 – 28 October 1988) was a Japanese photographer whose work in the late 1920s and early 1930s in and near Tottori, where he lived, made him a major figure in Japanese pictorialism.
Despite living far from any metropolis, Shiotani was famous among photographers nationwide. He portrayed landscapes, seascapes, priests at a local temple, his family, and other quotidian matters and scenes; his images at times unmediated, at others exploiting lens aberration or using darkroom effects. Among the photographers directly influenced by him was Shōji Ueda, who lived nearby.
As ideals and fashions in photography changed, Shiotani's 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. Many prints made by Shiotani survive in museum collections, and since 2016 four photobooks largely or exclusively dedicated to his work have been published in Japan.
Sadayoshi Shiotani (鹽谷 定好, Shiotani Sadayoshi) was born on 24 October 1899 in Akasaki (since 2004 part of Kotoura), Tottori, to a family who owned a shipping agency. He was the eldest son; his paternal grandfather had held various important civic posts and been interested in photography.
As a young boy, Shiotani enjoyed drawing and was good at it. When he was 12 or 13, he received a Vest Pocket Kodak 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 and was popular in Japan. When Shiotani was 13, he participated in a photography event at Karo (賀露) harbour in Tottori.
From 1912, Shiotani attended Kurayoshi Agricultural High School (now Tottori Prefectural College of Agriculture). 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 (90×130 mm) camera with a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, although he continued to use the Vest Pocket Kodak (or at least its lens) for the rest of his life.
Shiotani's fellow photographers formed the Kōei Club in 1919, with over two hundred members. (Kōei, 光影, means "light and shade".) 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 (西郷北濤), 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" (i.e. Vest Pocket Kodak club; ベスト倶楽部, Besuto Kurabu) 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 hazy kind. The aim was geijutsu shashin, which, depending on context, could be translated as "artistic", "art", "salon" or "pictorialist" photography. The meniscus lens of the Vest Pocket Kodak did not permit detail, and photographers using it – notably Masataka Takayama, Jun Watanabe, Makihiko Yamamoto, Mitsugi Arima (有馬光城) and Kōyō Yasumoto (安本江陽) – would often remove an aperture limiter from around its lens (fūdo hazushi), 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, Kanji Maeta.
In 1922, Shiotani married Sadako Inoue (井上貞子, 1905–1988). They had three sons, Sōnosuke (宗之助, b. June 1923), Reiji (玲二, November 1926 – March 1927) and Makoto (誠, August 1940 – September 1945); and two daughters, Yūko (優子, b. February 1930) and Yōko (陽子, b. July 1934).
Shiotani's earliest known appearance in a major magazine was his Still life (Seibutsu), among contest winners in the January 1925 issue of Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyū. His Shadow (Kage) appeared in the March 1925 issue of Camera. As an editor responsible for selecting work for both magazines (and editor in chief of Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyū), Kenkichi Nakajima realized that Shiotani was unusually talented.
In August 1925, Shiotani and four other photographers made a trip around the coasts of Shimane Prefecture: Kaka (加賀), Konami (小波), Shichirui, Mihonoseki, and particularly Okidomari. 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 (Mura no chōkan) was published in the March 1926 issue of Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyū. It was influenced by Picasso and Braque's paintings from L'Estaque (which Shiotani knew of via the writings of Nakajima), 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 (Gyoson), a photograph of Takohana.
From 1925 to 1927, Shiotani was also one of the key members of a group of photographers that in 1928 formally became the Japan Photography Association (Nihon Kōga Kyōkai, 日本光画協会). A successor to the Japan Photographic Art Association (Nihon Kōga Geijutsu Kyōkai, 日本光画芸術協会), this published a magazine (Gashū, 画集) 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 (and who in 1933 published a how-to guide for the Vest Pocket Kodak).
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 The Photo-Times. All four were new, championing the new trends in art photography whose major proponents were Tetsusuke Akiyama (秋山轍輔) of the Tokyo Photographic Research Society and Kōrō Kometani (米谷紅浪) of the Naniwa Photo Club, both with "a style reminiscent of academic painting"; Shinzō Fukuhara of the Japan Photographic Society, with "light and its harmony" (influenced by Impressionism); and Hakuyō Fuchikami of the Japan Photographic Art Association), 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 (including Kobe) 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 (海蔵寺), 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.