Tadahiko Hayashi - America and Later Work

America and Later Work

In 1955 Hayashi accompanied Keiko Takahashi (高橋敬緯子, Takahashi Keiko), Japan's contender, to the Miss Universe contest in Florida; his photographs of the trips appeared in magazines. For decades thereafter they were little known, but forty were exhibited in a major posthumous retrospective, where they reminded viewers that Hayashi did not need to stage and excelled at the snapshot too; though his photographs still contrasted with Kimura's in the subjects' awareness of being photographed.

He also appeared in the film Jūninin no shashinka (12人の写真家, Twelve photographers), directed by Hiroshi Teshigawara (勅使河原宏, Teshigawara Hiroshi).

Two years later, the first of Hayashi's books was published: Shōsetsu no furusato (The village settings of stories) for which Hayashi traveled around Japan to the settings of novels and short stories, looking for and sometimes staging the scenes that are echoed in the fiction. It would be seven more years before his second book was published (a pace that was normal at the time), and the photographs that had made him famous in the kasutori period would only be anthologized from the 1980s.

Hayashi's middle age had its setbacks. His wife died in 1961, his tuberculosis recurred in 1970, and his second son Jun died in 1973. But he continued to produce books, notably the lavish Nihon no gaka 108-nin, portraits of and representative works by 108 Japanese painters, which won both the Mainichi Arts Prize and the Japan Photographers Association's Annual Prize a year after its publication in 1977.

In the early 1980s Hayashi traveled around Japan, taking photographs for a number of photo books. However, in 1985 he announced that he had cancer of the liver. This did not stop him from working: he embarked on work for a book of photographs for a book on the Tōkaidō, suggesting to Yōichi Midorikawa that Midorikawa should do another on the San'yōdō. Hayashi survived publication of his own book by two months; Midorikawa's book only came out a year later.

From 1980 until 1989 Hayashi was principal of the photographic academy Nihon Shashin Gakuen (日本写真学園).

Hayashi's works are displayed by the Shunan City Museum of Art and History in Shūnan, Yamaguchi.