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“Nakaji Yasui is without a doubt the father of Japanese photography.”
— Daido Moriyama

Nakaji Yasui was one of the most important artists in the early period of Japanese photography. Born in Osaka in 1903, Yasui’s artistic achievements as a photographer are unparalleled in the prewar period. Yasui experimented without prejudice and created a body of work that spans a wide range from pictorialism to photomontages and straight photography, portraits and landscapes. The 50 photographs faithfully reproduced as part of this large-format publication were first published after Yasui’s death in 1942. Despite the brief length of his career, Yasui’s works have had a tremendous influence on the photographers who followed, the most prominent among them being Daido Moriyama.

“I have always thought of photography in Japan as having been initiated by Nakaji Yasui. The range and depth of his vision, the freedom and flexibility of his thoughts are incomparable. All across the world today there are viewers who appreciate Japanese photography. When we go upsteam to seek the fountainhead of such recognition, we find before us the strikingly enormous range of what might be called the Nakaji mountains with their graceful, azure peaks.”
— Daido Moriyama

This volume also includes detailed commentary by photography critic Kotaro Iizawa and photography historian Ryuichi Kaneko (included in Japanese and in English translation).