Toshio Shibata

The photographs of Toshio Shibata convey a powerful drama generated by the conflict of natural forces against man-made structures. Water spills, crashes, glides, and pours over walls, sluices, concrete blocks and channels, in an endless gravity- propelled dance. Huge structures wind around highways and grasp the hillsides on which they are built.  Using an 8 x 10-inch camera, he eliminates most references to scale, placement, and point of view while providing crisp detail and texture. Under Shibata’s eye, the man-altered landscape becomes a mysterious abstract composition in which the shapes and patterns intrinsic to both the natural and artificial forms becomes visible.

Shibata began his career in Japan, and the photographs he made there explore the inherent visual contradictions of a land relinquishing its natural resources to structures meant to contain and preserve them. He was given a fellowship to come to America in 1996, and made extraordinary pictures here that reflect an unmistakable Japanese aesthetic.  His sublime portraits of public works projects in both countries show that human intervention on a pristine landscape need not be jarring but can, in fact, be in exquisite harmony with nature.

Toshio Shibata was born in 1949 and his work has been exhibited internationally since 1971. His work has been collected by major museums including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Centre national de la Photographie, Paris. He will be feted with a mid-career retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography opening December 13, 2008.