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. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter the frames, but their trace, particularly their effort and labor, is visible through the built environment in Shibata’s photographs.
A desolate and often eerie atmosphere often pervades the images. Though the artist is known more widely for his black-and-white photographs of landscapes, there are also color photographs that feel equally spectral with an encroaching and sometimes claustrophobic melancholy that permeates steel bridge girders, abandoned freeways, dams, and, of course, his highly subject matter, the brutalist concrete anti-landslide enforcement blankets dotted along Japan’s landscape that prevent tumbling rock and earth from catastrophic effect. The artist has made many images of this motif and has concentrated on the concrete beauty of the dams that often lie just off in the distance.
Suggesting Shibata to be an architectural photographer would belittle the subjectivity found in his images. The landscapes and the architecture that feature within are less a series of observations about rations and spatial functionality than they are ways to understand and map the the world the artist travels along. Often, the subject matter that Shibata stops to photograph is functional and prepossess a utility linked to planning and management, but is also a precursor of elements left unseen, such as earthquakes, floods, and other messages that lie in waiting. The infrastructure he photographs is also oblique and sculptural. It suggests a prowess for observing parts of the concretized landscape that remain, though ubiquitous, mostly unseen due in considerable measure to their utility and monumentality. Shibata’s subject matter relies mainly on these components.
Shibata’s new book Day For Night (Deadbeat Club, 2023) shows another side of the artist. Though architecture or variations of architecture lie at the heart of this work, a consideration of diurnal yearning enters the frame. Instead of focusing solely on the dynamic warped steel grids of the concretized landscape, the book looks at the artist’s early work from 1980-1988 and adds a layer of nighttime to the equation. Though we find the steel blankets covering the landscape during the book’s second half, the first half looks at a similar subject matter during the night.
Added to the shared images of streets and carriageways is also a more intimate look at shopfronts illuminated by a ghostly light, steel hubcaps, and consumer goods that peer back at the photographer from their showcase windows, creating a strange and ethereal feeling of being on display and simultaneously looking back at the artist in their illuminance. The images within the shopfront feel oddly alive and are aligned with a sense of unease. Cars and components of road manufacture also dot the streetscape and create a feeling of abandonment.
What makes the work exciting is that, like Eiji Ohashi’s images of isolated Coca-Cola and other vending machines dotting the Japanese landscape, 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. This disconnect applied to the camerawork of Shibata signals a strange sense of punctuating effect in which 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 upsidedown world that is cunning and uncanny in means.
I am reminded of other photographers who have embraced the night with a similar way of communicating the atmosphere of solitude. Todd Hido, Robert Adams, and Ohashi are artists who have embraced the upside-down world that night presents with similar qualities. I am somewhat loathe to mention Brassaï in the same context as he did not want to exclude all humans from their activity by publishing his essential photobook, Paris de Nuit, in 1933. John Gossage’s Berlin In the Time of The Wall and Stadt des Schwarz, as well as Marie Jose Jongerius’s Concrete Wilderness, are probably better examples where the limits of human activity lie adjacent, very uncomfortably, the product of their efforts in an oblique and desanctified manner.
With Day For Night, the artist and Deadbeat Club have made a fascinating book that adds to our perception of Shibata. There is something less clinical in these early works that does not detract from the more austere works that have come to define much of the artist’s career but instead adds an element, contrarily enough, of humanity and the ability to project and emote a sense of insecurity when viewing the photographs. They feel familiar and alien at once and leave us to question the power and pathos associated with images made during the night. The silence asks us to contemplate. What we get up to during our daytime hours, and why we toil the way we do.
It should be mentioned in this book review that I have chosen to concentrate on the early nighttime works as they have added a surprising element to how I think of Shibata’s work in general. However, there are daytime images that are also significant. The artist and publisher have struck gold in archive rummaging to find the bedrock for a new book. It is beautiful, if melancholy, mediation on Shibata’s work, and it fits beautifully on my shelf, unlike some of the artist’s more king-sized publications, asking more of my attention and allowing me the comfort of going through the book several times over a week, something that I rarely do with big books. It unlocks more of my interest in Shibata, which I am grateful for. It is fair to note that seeing the DBC team move outside North America is also fantastic. I highly recommend this book.
