• Photographer Tadahiko Hayashi, 1918

Hayashi was born in Saiwai-chō, Tokuyama (since 2003 part of Shūnan), Yamaguchi on 5 March 1918, to a family running a photographic studio (Hayashi Shashin-kan, 林写 真館). The boy's mother, Ishi Hayashi (林イ シ, Hayashi Ishi) was an accomplished photographer, particularly of portraits, taught by her father; his father, Shin'ichi Hayashi (林真 一, Hayashi Shin'ichi) was a mediocre photographer and a spendthrift; the boy's grandfather forced the parents to divorce and the boy grew up with his mother and surrounded by photography. He did well at school, where he took photographs.

Hayashi graduated from school in 1935, and his mother determined that he would apprentice himself to the photographer Shōichi Nakayama (中山 正一, Nakayama Shōichi). Nakayama was based in Ashiya, Hyōgo, but had a second studio in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. Hayashi did much running of errands between the two. On one occasion he passed the Ashiya studio of the photographer Iwata Nakayama late at night and was reinspired in photography by his realization of the effort Nakayama was putting in. A year later he contracted tuberculosis and returned to Tokuyama, where he enthusiastically practiced photography while recuperating, and participated in the group Neko-no-me-kai (猫の 眼会, “Cat's-Eye Group”) under the photographer Sakae Tamura using the name Jōmin Hayashi (林城 民, Hayashi Jōmin).

In 1937 Hayashi went to Tokyo, where he studied at the Oriental School of Photography (オリ エンタル写真学校, Orientaru Shashin Gakkō), again under Tamura. On his graduation the following year, he returned to Tokuyama, but “spent a year in dissipation, drinking heavily every night”. Yet he managed to retain his interest and prowess in photography. In 1939 his family decided to make a final allowance to him of ¥200, which he quickly wasted in Tokyo on food and drink. Tamura got him a job in a developing and printing firm in Yokohama, where he worked at both printmaking and commercial photography. A few months later he moved to Tōkyō Kōgeisha (東京光芸社) in Ginza, where he soon had an unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his unusual command, gained in Yokohama, of flash illumination. Demand for his services increased. He married Akiko Sasaki (佐々木秋子, Sasaki Akiko), from Tokuyama.

In 1940 Hayashi's photographs appeared in the photography magazine Shashin Shūhō, and the next year also the women's magazine Fujin Kōron, and Asahi Camera. The couple had their first child, a son, Yasuhiko (靖彦).

In 1942 Hayashi went to the Japanese embassy in Beijing, with the North China News Photography Association (華北 広報写真協会, Kahoku Kōhō-shashin Kyōkai), which he had just cofounded. While in China he did a lot of work with what was then regarded as a wide angle lens; this led to his nickname of Waido no Chū-san (ワイ ドの忠さん, “wide Mr Chū”).

Hayashi's photographs were published in the women's magazines Fujin Kōron and Shinjoen and the photography magazines Shashin Bunka and Shashin Shūhō. The couple had their second son, Jun (潤), in 1943.

Hayashi was still in Beijing at the end of the war. He returned to Japan with Jun Yoshida (吉田 潤, Yoshida Jun) in 1946. The family photo studio had been destroyed, but with Yoshida he set up a new studio, busily churning out photographs for twenty or more kasutori magazines (カス トリ雑誌, kasutori - zasshi) (cheap, sensational and short lived magazines) every month. As Hayashi would later describe it, Yoshida would tell publishers that he photographed women, and Hayashi (later renowned for his portraits of men) would tell them that he photographed anything other than women. The ploy seems to have worked: he was frenetically busy, and the photographer Shōji Ueda later termed him “[t]he first professional photographer in Japan”. He also found time to remarry in 1946, his second wife being Kane Watanabe (渡辺カネ, Watanabe Kane); they had a son, Hidehiko (英比 古), in 1947.

Always gregarious, Hayashi had friends and acquaintances among the buraiha (dissolute writers), and his portraits of Osamu Dazai and Sakunosuke Oda, both taken in the Lupin (ルパン Rupan) bar, are now famous. At the end of that year, the literary magazine Shōsetsu Shinchō published the first of Hayashi's series of portraits, titled Bunshi (literati), of chūkan bungaku (中間 文学), other writers and figures close to the world of literature, in its January 1948 issue; the series would continue until 1949 and was later collected into an anthology. Hayashi's portraits show their subjects in context, and the combination of their subject matter and the method by which he took them — by his own account intermediate (chūkan) between the tense, decisive style of Ken Domon and the relaxed, informal style of Ihei Kimura — led them to be termed “intermediate photographs” (中間写真, chūkan shashin). The series of portraits that he was commissioned to take remained fresh; that of an unposed (and unsuspecting) Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is particularly famous.

Meanwhile, his portraits of orphans and the desperate but sometimes pleasurable life of the city were run in camera magazines, general interest magazines, and more surprisingly in Fujin Kōron; these too would be anthologized, first in 1980 in a book, Kasutori Jidai (カストリ時代, "The rotgut period"), that has a lasting reputation as a historic document.

By 1954 Hayashi and the photographers Shōtarō Akiyama and Kira Sugiyama were sharing a studio in the basement of the Nihon Seimei Building, a dirty old building (subsequently demolished) in Hibiya (Chiyoda-ku).

In the early 1950s, a strong trend toward photographing unaltered reality was fueled by manifestos in camera magazines by Ken Domon and others; Hayashi bucked this by arranging his photographs so that the whole and every part would form a flawless composition, staging if this were necessary. For this reason he is commonly regarded as very unlike a photographer such as Ihei Kimura.

In 1950 his fourth son was born.

Through this period Hayashi was busily cofounding and participating in various organizations of photographers. Together with Eiichi Akaho (赤穂英一, Akaho Eiichi), Shōtarō Akiyama, Ryōsuke Ishizu, Yōichi Midorikawa and Shōji Ueda, he was a founding member of Ginryūsha in 1947; the group would meet once every two months, for discussion and drinking. A year later he joined Ken Domon, Ihei Kimura, Shigeru Tamura and others in founding the Photographers' Group (写真 家集団, Shashinka Shūdan), which would later become the Japan Photographers Association (日本 写真家協会, Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai). In 1953 he was a founding member of the photography section of Nika Society (二科 会写真部, Nikakai shashinbu).

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.