Aiyu Photography Club

Aiyu Photography Club (Japanese: 愛友写真倶楽部, Hepburn: Aiyū Shashin Kurabu) was an amateur art-photography club founded in 1912 in Nagoya, Japan.

In museum scholarship on Nagoya’s photographic culture, the club is treated as a starting point for modern photographic expression in the city and as a leading force in Japan’s pictorialism (art-photography) movement during the 1920s.

Works by early members of the club have been surveyed and exhibited by the Nagoya City Art Museum, and surviving prints (including works by founder Chōtarō Hidaka and cofounder Gorō Yamamoto) are held there, including works in private collections on deposit at the museum.

A Nagoya City Art Museum publication notes that the club’s secretariat was located at Yamamoto Gorō Shoten (山本五郎商店) on Hirokōji in central Nagoya, linking the club’s activities to the photographic-supply shop associated with photographer Gorō Yamamoto. Biographical accounts also identify Gorō Yamamoto as the father of the avant-garde photographer and poet Kansuke Yamamoto.