was a 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. Life and career Early life Sadayoshi Shiotani (, 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 of the sixth patriarch; the fifth, his grandfather, had held various important civic posts, and had some interest in photography. As a young boy, Shiotani enjoyed drawing and was good at it. When he was 12 or 13, he received a 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 14, he participated in a photography event at Karo () harbour in Tottori. From 1912, Shiotani attended Kurayoshi Agricultural High School (now ). 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. Shiotani's fellow photographers formed the Kōei Club in 1919, with over two hundred members. (Kōei, , 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 (), the key figure in