was a Japanese photographer, photography theorist, and educator. He was active in the avant-garde art world in Japan after World War II, both creating his own experimental photographs, and taking widely circulated documentary photographs of other artists and art projects. He became an authority in Japanese photography, extensively publishing commentaries and educating future generations of photographers. Biography Early life: 1923–1945 Ōtsuji was born in the Kōtō ward of Tokyo on July 27, 1923. He first became interested in photography when he purchased back issues of the photography periodical Photo Times from a used book store. Through Photo Times he first encountered avant-garde photography from Europe, the United States, and Japan, and was deeply inspired by the photography criticism of Shūzō Takiguchi and Abe Nobuya. In 1942, Ōtsuji enrolled in the art department at the Tokyo Professional School of Photography (today Tokyo Polytechnic University). In 1943, in the middle of his studies, he was drafted into the army and trained as an aircraft mechanic. He later graduated from the Tokyo Professional School of Photography in 1944. Early career: 1945–1952 In 1945, after World War II, Ōtsuji returned to Tokyo and began work as a photographer at Takabayashi Studio, a photography studio run by Takabayashi Takafusa and Takabayashi Yasushi. In 1946, he met the artist Yoshishige Saitō, who invited him to join the magazine Katei Bunka (Home Culture). Ōtsuji worked as a staff photographer for Katei Bunka for one year. In 1947, he opened his own photography studio in Sendagaya, Tokyo. In 1949, Ōtsuji joined the modernist exhibition society Bijutsu Bunka Kyōkai ("Art and Culture Association") and showed his photograph Itamashiki Buttai ("Painful Object"). The same year, he and other alumni from the Tokyo Professional School of Photography began to publish the magazine Fotogurafii ("Photography"), to which Ōtsuji contributed several written essays on photography. Ōtsuji's early individual works are often viewed as a re-exploration of prewar Surrealist photography in Japan. For example, his work Aishi ni tsuite ("About Feet") (1949) captures a raw chicken positioned upside down with its legs dramatically crossed in mid-air, thus offering a strange, almost lifelike view of the dead animal. Another early series of photographs, shot in the leading Bijutsu Bunka member Nobuya Abe's studio in 1950, depict the future Jikken Kōbō member Hideko Fukushima and other women, both clothed and nude, posing within a geometric network of strings, thus appearing like dolls or puppets. Following these