Minoru Sakata

was a Japanese photographer active in the prewar avant-garde photography networks of Nagoya. While living in Osaka he was a member of the Naniwa Photography Club, and after moving to Nagoya he led the formation of Nagoya Photo Gruppe in 1934. He later participated in the Nagoya Avant-Garde Club and the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde. He was also described as a leading organizer and polemicist in Nagoya's prewar avant-garde photography circles.

Career Takeba identifies Sakata as one of the figures who helped bring the experimental currents of Shinkō shashin from Osaka into Nagoya in the 1930s. Copies survive in institutional collections including the British Museum and the Nagoya City Art Museum.

Legacy Sakata's photographs and his role in Nagoya's prewar avant-garde networks have been revisited in later museum projects on Japanese photography, including the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum exhibition Avant-Garde Rising: The Photographic Vanguard in Modern Japan. In Japan's Modern Divide, Kōtarō Iizawa reproduced Sakata's photograph Kiki (1938) within the Nagoya avant-garde context in which Kansuke Yamamoto also worked. The 2025 MEM exhibition The Legacy of Avant-garde Photography in Nagoya, 1930s–50s likewise presented Sakata among the key photographers through whom Nagoya's avant-garde legacy has been reassessed, alongside figures such as Yamamoto, Keiichirō Gotō, Minayoshi Takada, Tsugio Tajima, and Yoshifumi Hattori.