Contacts

“For over three decades Toshio Shibata has been traveling across both his native Japan and the United States, making photographs of landscapes at the intersection of the natural and the built environments. (…) Shibata’s chosen subject of infrastructure occupies this same territory and his images share the cool detachment that characterizes much contemporary landscape photography. And yet they are not invested with a critical message—they are more elusive, more mysterious. They invite us to interpret them freely, with the same freedom that Shibata experiences when driving across the Japanese archipelago, leaving himself open to chance encounters with the landscape. (…) (…)
Traditionally his photographic prints have been made on a large scale, so as to immerse the viewer in his images. This scale reveals the extraordinary detail contained within his images, giving the sense of a heightened version of reality. However, he recently presented a small group of photographs as contact prints, no more than a few centimetres wide. By compressing his borrowed landscapes in this way, a further layer of mystery is applied to these images. Rather than overpowering us with their scale, they become more delicate, more fragile as the geometric lines and abstract qualities of these compositions is emphasized. These contact prints provided the inspiration for this book.”Traditionally his photographic prints have been made on a large scale, so as to immerse the viewer in his images. This scale reveals the extraordinary detail contained within his images, giving the sense of a heightened version of reality. However, he recently presented a small group of photographs as contact prints, no more than a few centimetres wide. By compressing his borrowed landscapes in this way, a further layer of mystery is applied to these images. Rather than overpowering us with their scale, they become more delicate, more fragile as the geometric lines and abstract qualities of these compositions is emphasized. These contact prints provided the inspiration for this book.”

Marc Feustel