Photo of the Week #238

March 27, 2023
Toshio Shibata has explained that the making of this timeless photograph was as spontaneous as the quality of the light itself. While driving through Kōchi Prefecture, in southern Japan, he saw the bridge bathed in fleeting afternoon sunlight, and immediately stopped his car. He prefers to photograph quickly, which allows him to work in locations where longer set-up would be prohibitive (he notes that “Japanese mountain roads are very narrow. If you stop the car other cars cannot pass, so you have to hurry.") It’s a testament to his keen eye and strong sense of composition that he was able to capture this enduring image so swiftly.

Shibata studied oil painting and printmaking in Tokyo during the early 1970s, and from there transferred to the photography department at the Royal Academy of Ghent in Belgium. He credits a trip in 1978 to the newly opened Zabriskie Gallery in Paris, a gallery devoted entirely to photography, as a clarifying moment. The gallery was presenting a survey show of 100 years of landscape photography in the American west and seeing the way landscape was rendered by modern masters like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams—compositions where a wealth of detail is synthesized into a unified artistic viewpoint—pointed Shibata on his path to making pictures like this one.