Chang Chao-Tang was a high school student in 1959 when he borrowed his older brother’s Aires Automat 120 twin-lens reflex camera without much thought. He liked going for long walks with the camera after school; it eased the burden of his homework. Eventually, he found himself taking photos with the camera every day, photos of common people and places in Taiwan, like youngsters poking out of street corners or at beaches, farm animals, and dolls.

“Those images are so pure and innocent,” he said. “You can’t go back to that kind of feeling.”

Mr. Chang hardly suspected that he would grow up to become one of Taiwan’s most important photographers — in fact, he had such little regard for this kind of future that he did not even bother to save his negatives. Yet half a century later, these images have been in major exhibitions, including one that opens this week at the Gallery Tosei in Japan. Called “Images of Youth (1959-1961): The Photographs of Chang Chao-Tang,” the exhibition opened April 4 and runs through April 26.

“Of course, I did not think when I was 16 about whom I would become in the future,” Mr. Chang said. “Did you?”

As a young man, he could not afford to make prints, only to develop the film and make one contact sheet at the local photo shop. All that survives from that time are those contact sheets, with each image measuring a mere 5×6 centimeters. In 2010, he blew these tiny images up to 16×20 for his retrospective in Taipei. Now, for this show, encouraged by the gallery, he created negatives from his contact sheets and printed them in the darkroom.

Photo

Using a twin lens reflex — where he had to look down into the viewfinder — Mr. Chang took his photos from the waist up, a perspective that reinforced his childlike curiosity. “Sulin, Taiwan. 1960” shows a bull whose nose and face are sharply in focus looming over us while a blurry man with a slightly tilted hat walks behind it, holding onto a plow. The bull looks powerful, and we almost feel we are standing there with the photographer, with all of our heads reaching only to the top of the beast’s legs.

“If you kneel down, the camera is down to ground,” Mr. Chang said. “That makes your subject seem more big and powerful, so you have to notice this.”

But there is also a sense of isolation in his photographs.

“I took photographs because I felt lonely and empty at the time,” Mr. Chang said. “Taking pictures brought comfort and strength to me; just like someone would use a pen or musical instrument to share his passion, I could use a camera to explore myself.”

Many of his childhood images are sheltered. It wasn’t until his university years that he started to get a glimpse of photography and other arts outside of Taiwan (which he learned about mainly through Life or Time magazine at his school library).

Taiwanese life was cut off from the rest of the world. Mr. Chang’s first images were taken just one decade into what is commonly known as the White Terror period, or the 38 years of martial law (1949-1987) in Taiwan imposed by the Chinese Kuomintang. This period of martial law followed the 228 Massacre, an antigovernment uprising that was ended by the Kuomintang-led Republic of China. Between 10,000 and 30,000 Taiwanese civilians were killed.

Photojournalism and documentary photography, among other arts, were discouraged during this period. Many artists and intellectuals were persecuted for fear they would resist Kuomintang rule, and some 140,000 Taiwanese were imprisoned.

But, looking at Mr. Chang’s photographs, you would not know any of this was going on. Mr. Chang says he did not even know about White Terror until college. He was not using photography as a tool to document White Terror.

It makes sense then that Mr. Chang refuses to identify himself as a documentary photographer, even though he has a high regard for the genre, particularly photographers like Robert Frank.

“I would rather be a photo essayist because it gives you more space to develop your own idiosyncratic vision,” he said in a 2012 video about his “Introspectives” exhibition at the Taiwan Academy in New York.

Photo

Also, if documentary photography is defined by the photographer’s intention, then Mr. Chang’s early work was not in that tradition of using photography to express a need for reform. There is room for allegory and the photographer’s interpretation.

“My images are of real people and places, but they are not about superficial emotions nor are they just a result of being a witness to events,” he wrote in his 2012 essay that introduced “Introspectives.”

“A transformation takes place, in which the images become encoded with metaphors, and with my thoughts,” he wrote. “What grasps me is not a view but a memory, an atmosphere or state that sparks an unexpected thought, a subtle emotion, or a whirl of energy.”

Additionally, Mr. Chang often staged scenes, as with the first of this kind in his “Images of Youth.” Called “Panchiao, Taiwan. 1961,” it is one of Mr. Chang’s favorites and shows a baby doll — naked except for its shoes — peering over a horizontal bar at a playground. The bar crosses the photograph a perfect one-third of the way down. The doll, which is on the far right side of the frame, faces away from us. We only see its backside. The doll and the bar are in focus, and trees and a gray sky are beyond the doll and out of focus. It is as if we are looking at the trees with the doll.

“I needed a pure and unread aspect, so I made the doll naked and had him face the trees and sky,” he said. “It’s just like the baby doll seeks his dreams and freedom.”

When asked about these staged photographs, Mr. Chang said that while he no longer created them, at the time he used them to express his emptiness, loss and anger.

“For a young man, this is the way of rebelling against the adult world,” he said. “Sometimes, the artificial can be more real and powerful than the natural world.”

Now 70, he finds satisfaction in photographing what is in front of him.

“To record the real world and passing memory is more important to me now,” he said.

Does he see more as an adult than he did as a child?

“We may see more now,” he said, “but we may also confuse more.”

“Images of Youth (1959-1961): The Photographs of Chang Chao-Tang,” is open at the at the Gallery Tosei in Japan and will remain on view through April 26.

Follow @Rena_Silverman and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.