Iwata Nakayama

was a Japanese avant-garde photographer.

Nakayama was born in Yanagawa, Fukuoka (Japan). His wife, Nakayama Masako (中山正子) became an English language educator after their years aboard. His father was an inventor who held a patent for a fire extinguisher. Iwata moved to Tokyo and was educated at the private school Kyohoku-Chūgakkō. After graduating, he entered Tokyo University of the Arts as the first student of its photography course. After learning artistic and commercial techniques there, he moved to the United States in 1918 as an overseas student of California State University, sent by the Japanese government. However he quit studying and began to work at a photo studio run by Tōyō Kikuchi in New York City.

Years Abroad in New York and Paris With his practical skills, he established his own studio, Laquan Studio, on the fashionable 5th Avenue and found success as a professional portrait photographer. In New York City, he had contact with several other Japanese painters such as Toshi Shimizu. He also had a relationship with Japanese German American poet Sadakichi Hartmann who was also very active as a photo critic, publishing in Camera Note and Camera Work edited by Alfred Stieglitz. Nakayama took several portraits of Hartmann. The grittiness of Nayakama's urbanscape photographs of New York City, quite a contrast with his earlier dreamlike landscapes, might be attributed to his contact with Hartmann who had a reputation as the "King of Bohemia" in the Greenwich Village. Curator of Shoto Museum of Art, Yuri Mitsuda says that, "Perhaps the most significant influence that Nakayama acquired from the talented and rebellious Sadakichi was a sincere commitment to art and a critical spirit, which he would display in his later years." He lived in the Montparnasse area of the city and had interactions with fellow Japanese expatriate painters Tsuguhara Foujita, Kinosuke Ebihara, Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini, and Surrealist Photographer Man Ray. The British Museum in London, England; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan.

Selected photos