Fukuda was born on 11 January 1899 in Nakanoseki (later part of Hōfu

Hofu, Yamaguchi

is a city located in Yamaguchi, Japan.-History:Hōfu means "the capital of Suō Province".The eastern part of Yamaguchi prefecture was formerly called Suō Province.The city was founded on August 25, 1936...

), Yamaguchi

Yamaguchi Prefecture

is a prefecture of Japan in the Chūgoku region on Honshū island. The capital is the city of Yamaguchi, in the center of the prefecture. The largest city, however, is Shimonoseki.- History :...

 (Japan). He moved to Tokyo in 1920, and worked at Takachiho Seisakujo (later renamed Olympus

Olympus Corporation

is a Japan-based manufacturer of optics and reprography products. Olympus was established on 12 October 1919, initially specializing in microscope and thermometer businesses. Its global headquarters are in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, while its USA operations are based in Center Valley, Pennsylvania,...

), where he worked making thermometers and developed an interest in photography, buying a Vest Pocket Kodak. The 1923 Kantō earthquake

1923 Great Kanto earthquake

The struck the Kantō plain on the Japanese main island of Honshū at 11:58:44 am JST on September 1, 1923. Varied accounts hold that the duration of the earthquake was between 4 and 10 minutes...

 impelled him to leave the company and move to Kansai

Kansai

The or the lies in the southern-central region of Japan's main island Honshū. The region includes the prefectures of Mie, Nara, Wakayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyōgo, and Shiga. Depending on who makes the distinction, Fukui, Tokushima and even Tottori Prefecture are also included...

.

Fukuda ran a photographic studio in Sakai

Sakai, Osaka

is a city in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. It has been one of the largest and most important seaports of Japan since the Medieval era.Following the February 2005 annexation of the town of Mihara, from Minamikawachi District, the city has grown further and is now the fourteenth most populous city in...

 and Osaka

Osaka

is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...

, but this failed. He then worked as an editorial assistant on Hakuyō Fuchikami

Hakuyo Fuchikami

-Biography:Fuchikami was born in Kumamoto Prefecture and studied in Saga and Nagasaki.In 1922 Fuchikami organized Nihon Kōga Geijutsu Kyōkai and published the first issue of the photography magazine Hakuyō and continued the publication of this magazine until 1926.In 1928 he moved to Manchuria and...

's periodical Hakuyō. A photograph he took in 1925, shown in an exhibition (titled , Nihon Shashin Bijutsutenrankai) at Daimaru

Daimaru

is a Japanese department stores chain, principally located in the Kansai region of Japan. The chain is operated by Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Stores, a subsidiary of J. Front Retailing...

 department store (Osaka) and elsewhere, won the Ilford

Ilford Photo

Ilford Photo is a manufacturer of photographic materials known worldwide for its black-and-white film and papers and chemicals, as well as its range of Ilfochrome and Ilfocolor colour printing materials. Ilfochrome was formerly called Cibachrome, developed in partnership with the Swiss company...

 Diamond Prize the following year. Fukuda then worked as a commercial photographer in Sakai

Sakai, Osaka

is a city in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. It has been one of the largest and most important seaports of Japan since the Medieval era.Following the February 2005 annexation of the town of Mihara, from Minamikawachi District, the city has grown further and is now the fourteenth most populous city in...

 and Hiroshima

Hiroshima

is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...

.

Fukuda moved back to Tokyo in 1933, where, influenced by Modernist

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 trends from Europe (particularly Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...

), he pursued a successful career as an advertising photographer. (Other than for a year at Hōfu toward the end of the war, Fukuda stayed in Tokyo for the rest of his life.) A series of photographs in Asahi Camera

Asahi Camera

is a Japanese monthly photographic magazine.The first issue was that for April 1926. It has from the outset been published by Asahi Shinbun-sha, publisher of the newspaper Asahi Shinbun....

starting in 1936 and including portraits of Setsuko Hara

Setsuko Hara

is a Japanese actress who appeared in six of Yasujirō Ozu's films, most notably as Noriko in the 'Noriko Trilogy': Late Spring , Early Summer and Tokyo Story . Her other films for Ozu were Tokyo Twilight , Late Autumn and finally The End of Summer in 1961.She was born 会田 昌江 Masae Aida in...

 and Takako Irie

Takako Irie

was a Japanese film actress. Born in Tokyo into the aristocratic Higashibōjō family , she graduated from Bunka Gakuin before debuting as an actress at Nikkatsu in 1927. She became a major star, even starting her own production company, Irie Productions, in 1932...

 was very popular, and the next year Fukuda turned this into a book on photographing women that became a best-seller.

After the war, Fukuda published collections of nude studies and more books on photographic technique. He also experimented with color. The value he placed on the expression of beauty rendered his work old fashioned with the postwar wave of realism led by photographers such as Ken Domon

Ken Domon

is one of the most renowned Japanese photographers of the twentieth century. He is most celebrated as a photojournalist, though he may have been most prolific as a photographer of Buddhist temples and statuary....

, and the trends that followed this. In 1974 he was not even among one hundred living photographers profiled in a Camera Mainichi

Camera Mainichi

is a Japanese monthly magazine of photography that started in June 1954 and ceased publication in April 1985.As in most mass-market photography magazines, much of the editorial content of Camera Mainichi was devoted to news and reviews of cameras, lenses, and other equipment...

supplement. However, he contributed one volume (Shōka / Psalm) to the popular series "Sonorama Shashin Sensho" in 1979; in an afterword to this, Akira Hasegawa writes:

There are no photographers of women in Japan even today who have not been influenced by Fukuda in one way or another. Many techniques commonly used today were developed by Fukuda, a fact which has been forgotten.

Fukuda continued working in his old age. He died on 26 December 1991. The estimation of his work has since increased, and it is often anthologized in collections of Modernist and mid-century works. A major exhibition of his work was held in the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art

Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art

, in Yamaguchi City is the main art gallery of Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.Opened in 1979, the gallery has a permanent collection, part of which is exhibited at any one time, and also hosts special exhibitions....

 in 1994.

Works by Fukuda are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

The in Tokyo, Japan, is the foremost museum collecting and exhibiting contemporary Japanese art.This Tokyo museum is also known by the English acronym MOMAT...

, Yokohama Museum of Art

Yokohama Museum of Art

Yokohama Museum of Art , founded in 1989, is located in the futuristic Minato Mirai 21 district of Yokohama city next to the Yokohama Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan.-The collections:...

, and Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art.

Books by Fukuda

• Genzō no jissai . Asahi Camera Sōsha 14. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1937.
• Onna no utsushikata / Photokunst von Frauen. Tokyo: Ars, 1937. Despite the German-language alternative title, all in Japanese.
• Haru no shashin-jutsu . Tokyo: Ars, 1938.
• Watakushi no shashinshū: Sakuga no jissai / Meine Foto-bilder. Tokyo: Ars, 1938. Despite the German-language alternative title embossed in the cover, all in Japanese. Fifty-eight pages of black and white plates, followed by 84 pages of commentary and advice on photography.
• Onna no utsushikata: zoku . Tokyo: Ars, 1939.
• Seibutsu shashin no tsukurikata . Ars Shashin Bunko 18. Tokyo: Ars, 1939. How to photograph still lifes.
• Ginza . Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1941. With an essay by Tama Morita .
• Ushi kau shōgakkō . Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1941.
• Shuppatsu . Tokyo: Kōgasō, 1942. A miscellany of photographs: nature, women, still lifes, etc.
• Jingu Gaien . Tokyo: Nihon Shashin Kōgeisha, 1942.
• Rafu gotai . Tokyo: Ivuningusutā-sha, 1946.
• Onna no utsushikata . Tokyo: Seiusha, 1947. A booklet; not the same as the identically titled book published ten years earlier. Photographs of women, clothed and nude.
• Hana to rafu to / Nude et fleur. Tokyo: Ivuningusutā-sha, 1947. Flowers, nude women, their combination, etc. Despite the alternative title, in Japanese only.
• Shashin geijutsu . Tokyo: Kōgasō, 1949.
• Iro to hikari no geijutsu: Fukuda Katsuji tennenshoku shashin sakuhinshū . Tokyo: Ondorisha, 1951.
• Mite wakaru shashin no utsushikata . Tokyo: Onodorisha, 1951.
• Watakushi-tachi no kimono . Seikatsu Gurabia Sōsho. Tokyo: Ondorisha, 1951.
• Ginza . Tokyo: Ars, 1952.
• Kyōto / Kyoto. Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten, 1958.
• Kamera no sekai . Zusetsu Bunko 32. Tokyo: Kaiseisha, 1957.
• Bi no tabiji . Tokyo: Futsūsha, 1962.
• Shōka / Psalm. Sonorama Shashin Sensho 19. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama, 1979. Women (some of them nude), still lifes, and photographs from Fukuda's 1955 travel in Italy. No captions, but with some text in English as well as Japanese.
• Shashinka Fukuda Katsuji-ten: Kokō no modanisuto / Katsuji Fukuda. Yamaguchi: Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, 1994. Catalogue of a major exhibition of Fukuda's work held at the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art
  Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art
  , in Yamaguchi City is the main art gallery of Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.Opened in 1979, the gallery has a permanent collection, part of which is exhibited at any one time, and also hosts special exhibitions....
  
   in 1994.

Other books showing works by Fukuda

• Klochko, Deborah, ed. Modern Photography in Japan 1915–1940. San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 2001. ISBN 0-933286-74-0. The plates are not paginated but are alphabetically ordered by photographer. One still life of Fukuda's from 1925 is shown.
• Matsumoto Norihiko. , ed. A Collection of Japanese Photographs 1912–1940. Tokyo: Shashinkosha, 1990. Despite its English-only title, the book is in Japanese only. Plate 18 is a still life by Fukuda from 1925.
• Modanizumu no jidai / The Age of Modernism. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1995. Catalogue of an exhibition held 1995–96 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
  Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
  The is an art museum focused on photography. The museum was founded by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and is located in Meguro-ku, a short walk from Ebisu station in southwest Tokyo...
  
  . Three still lifes from 1925 on p. 42, a portrait on p. 74.
• Nihon nūdo meisakushū . Camera Mainichi bessatsu. Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1982. Pp. 81–88 show Fukuda's work from 1946 to 1980.
• Nihon kindai shashin no seiritsu to tenkai / The Founding and Development of Modern Photography in Japan. Tokyo: Tokyo Museum of Photography, 1995. Plates 166 and 167 are of works by Fukuda.
• Nihon no shashin: Uchinaru katachi, sotonaru katachi 2: Sengo shashin no hen'yō: 1945–80 / Japanese Photography: Form In/Out 2: The Transformation of Photography in the Postwar Era: 1945–80. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1996. Exhibition catalogue. A nude from 1946 is shown on p. 40.
• Sengo shashin / Saisei to tenkai / Twelve Photographers in Japan, 1945–55. Yamaguchi: Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, 1990. Despite the alternative title in English, almost exclusively in Japanese (although each of the twelve has a potted chronology in English). Pp. 82–92 show Fukuda's works from 1925 to 1965.
• Shashinka wa nani o hyōgen shita ka: 1945–1960 . Tokyo: Konica Plaza, 1991. Three postwar works and a potted chronology on pp. 48–49.