Shōji Ueda was a photographer from Tottori, Japan, who combined surrealism with realistic depiction. He was born in 1913 and received a camera from his father in 1930. He formed the photographic group Chūgoku Shashinka Shūdan in 1930 and studied at the Oriental School of Photography in Tokyo in 1932. Ueda found the sand dunes of Tottori excellent backdrops for single and group portraits. He gave up photography in 1941 but resumed shortly after the war and joined the Tokyo-based group Ginryūsha in 1947. Ueda's photographs of the dunes with Ken Domon and Yōichi Midorikawa were first published in the September and October 1949 issues of Camera and have been frequently anthologized.