Chotaro Hidaka

Chotaro Hidaka (Japanese: 日高 長太郎, Hepburn: Hidaka Chotaro; 1883 – 3 April 1926) was a Japanese photographer associated with Pictorialism. Based in Nagoya, he was a co-founder of the Aiyu Photography Club and one of the central figures in art photography in the Taisho era. He is best known for gum-bichromate landscape photographs, especially mountain scenes. Later exhibitions and scholarship have placed Hidaka and the Aiyu club at the beginning of modern photographic culture in Nagoya.

Life and career Hidaka was born in Higashiura, Aichi Prefecture. Later writing on Nagoya photography treats the club as one of the foundations of the city's photographic culture. In 2021, the same museum's exhibition The Movement of Modern Photography in Nagoya 1911-1972 opened with a section titled "The beginnings of photographic art: Hidaka Chotaro and the Aiyu Photography Club", underlining his place at the start of the city's photographic history. Reviews and exhibition texts for that show described the achievements of Hidaka and the Aiyu club as foundational to Nagoya's later reputation as a "city of photography".

Hidaka also figures in the longer genealogy of Nagoya photography. One of the Aiyu club's founders, Goro Yamamoto, later became the father of the Surrealist photographer Kansuke Yamamoto. In the 2021 Nagoya City Art Museum survey, works by Goro Yamamoto were placed immediately after the Hidaka and Aiyu section, presenting Hidaka's milieu as part of the prehistory of the city's later avant-garde photography.