Minayoshi Takada

Minayoshi Takada (高田皆義, Takada Minayoshi; 1899–1982) was a Japanese photographer born in Aichi Prefecture and active in Nagoya. In October 1922, he founded the photography journal Gin no Tsubo , and his work in the 1920s developed around the organization of line, plane, and tone. The History of Japanese Photography identifies Takada and Jun Tsusaka among the Nagoya photographers who drove constructivist photography at its peak around 1925 and helped chart a route toward modernism. After World War II, Takada co-founded the photographic group VIVI with Kansuke Yamamoto, Keiichirō Gotō, and Yoshifumi Hattori.

Early career and prewar activity A local history of Nagoya photography records that Takada exhibited in the third exhibition of the Aiyu Photography Club as a non-member and joined the club afterward. A 2025 catalogue published by the Shiga Museum of Art states that Takada worked for his family's securities company while studying photography under Shunyō Narita of the Aiyū Photography Club. A solo exhibition of Takada's work, organized by Photo Times, was held at the Shiseido Fine Art Department in Tokyo in October 1925. The discussion, which included Yoshio Shimozato, Chirū Yamanaka, and Minoru Sakata, was published as "Zen'ei shashin saikentō zadankai" in the February 1939 issue of Kameraman and addressed the differences between Surrealism and abstraction, the aesthetics of Surrealism, and automatism in photography.

VIVI and postwar avant-garde photography After the war, Takada became one of the founding members of VIVI, a Nagoya-based avant-garde photography group formed in 1947 with Yamamoto, Gotō, Hattori, and others. MEM's exhibition summary on the Nagoya avant-garde describes the formation of VIVI as part of the revival of avant-garde photography in the city under postwar conditions. The Nagoya City Art Museum annual report records the item as VIVI-sha's bulletin, issued by Takada in a four-page folded booklet format.