Arthur Lubow, reviewing the AIPAD photo fair for the New York Times, writes in his opening paragraph:
"Walking through the souk of 86 stalls that constitutes Aipad, the annual show of American photograph dealers, this visitor was struck (and not for the first time) by the way certain themes have persisted throughout the history of the medium. Toshio Shibata’s large color C-print “Okawa Village, Tosa County, Kochi Prefecture,” 2007, at the Laurence Miller Gallery, depicts the red steel trusses and cream yellow concrete guardrails of a bridge thrusting into a misty green forested hillside. Almost a century and a half before, Carleton Watkins photographed a rough-hewed wooden cabin alongside the Columbia River; a superb albumen print of “The Garrison, Columbia River,” c. 1867, is on view at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs. In both pictures, the care given to the lighting and to the composition manages to transform a man-made violation into something beautiful — a reminder of the camera’s insidious power to aestheticize almost anything."