Curated by Gabriel Bauret and William Ewing

This retrospective of Shōji Ueda’s work, the first outside Japan, gathers 151 black-and-white photographs made in the course of a seven-decade career that began in 1932, when Ueda opened a studio on a remote coast of the Sea of Japan whose sand dunes would provide a favorite setting. The artful images he staged there—including a series of witty tableaux featuring his family in the early ’50s—ran counter to the dark mood and aggressive experimentation that characterized photography in postwar Japan. But Ueda’s stylized modernism was never reactionary, only charmingly idiosyncratic, and it looks even more winning in retrospect.

Travels to Fundación “la Caixa,” Palma, Spain, Aug. 9–Oct. 9; Casa de la Provincia de Sevilla, Oct.–Dec.; Sala de Exposiciones de la Alameda, Málaga, Dec. 2005–Feb. 2006.

— Vince Aletti