Toshio Shibata
Kanazawahakkie, Yokohama City, 1984 | Night Photographs N-067, Hanamizu, Hiratsuka City, Kanagawa prefecture (Restaurant Cedre), 1982 | Nagae Hayam Town, from the series, 1982 | & more...
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY is a very simple newsletter where I share a collection of creative expressions I enjoyed coming across.
Toshio Shibata, a Japanese photographer born in 1949, has devoted his entire career to landscape. It was on his return to Japan in 1979, after training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in Belgium, that he found his favorite theme: infrastructure.
Polka Galerie
The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. […] The photographs feel monumental and isolated. […]
What makes the work exciting is that […] there is a sense of purpose or function that is counter-weighted by human use, and yet, nowhere in the imagery do we see literal signs of human beings along the landscape. When night is incorporated, there is a further disconnect between human cultural and social production and the everyday activities humans carry out during daylight. […]
The resonance between our understanding and viewing of the photographs is upended by a feeling that we do not belong in the frame and that what lies within is alien and non-human, perhaps, an upside-down world that is cunning and uncanny in means.
Brad Feuerhelm
I had just returned to Japan in 1980, after studying for four years in Flanders where time moves slowly, and the atmosphere is very relaxed. In addition to the rapidly advancing westernization, the reality of this new Tokyo, where old pre-war Showa is blended with modern Showa (post-war) looked disorderly and chaotic to me, and it was not easy to capture it visually. I struggled to realize my own mode of expression in this home country of mine, and began by chasing lights of the night-time to deflect this chaos.
Toshio Shibata
