Many remember his images taken in the dunes: strange stagings of figures, hard to date, whose charm and invention have no equivalent in the history of photography. Yet the whole of Shoji Ueda's work is little known, at least outside his country. No book had ever been devoted to him in France, apart from succinct catalogues published on the occasion of a few exhibitions, while in Japan a superb museum now houses his work and publications keep appearing on the various aspects and periods of it. This book, which appears in the collection L'oiseau rare, is therefore a high point in French photographic publishing. Without offering an exhaustive view of the work, it reveals, on the theme of childhood, a path through its main aesthetic stages, from the 1930s, the date of his first photographs, up to the 1970s.