Toshio Shibata

About the Exhibition

This exhibition presents Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata’s first series depicting the American landscape. These twenty-five new photographs are the product of an MCA-sponsored commission that brought Shibata to the United States several times in the past two years, and they are now part of the MCA’s Permanent Collection. Since 1983 Shibata has primarily photographed the monumental dams and erosion control structures that mark the landscape of interior Japan. Carefully composed and printed, his landscapes are known for having a strong abstract quality. Shibata’s recent images of the American terrain, on view here for the first time, continue his search for evidence of human intervention in the environment and depict the meeting of two worlds - the artificial and the natural.

Water often plays an important part in Shibata’s landscapes, as modern civilization has found it necessary to manage or redirect its flow. Like Japan, the United States maintains an excessive network of water control facilities throughout the country, although their climates are distinctively different. Shibata’s photographs of American irrigation paths, reservoirs, ducts, dams, and ditches subtly and elegantly document this intrusion into and regulation of the natural cycle. With their crisp surface detail and large-scale format, the works invite prolonged contemplation about the union of humankind and nature.

Shibata uses particular photographic techniques or stylistic devices that allow him to emphasize the content of his work while also focusing on the formal aspects of the photograph. By framing his scenes dramatically, he allows the viewer to see only a fragment of the larger landscape. The elimination of the horizon line and any traces of the sky, along with his unusual points of view, produce a disorienting effect, making you wonder where Shibata’s camera was perched while taking the photograph. These features, combined with the resulting shallow space emptied of color by the use of black-and-white film, remove the landscape from reality, transforming it into an abstract composition of lights and darks, curves and geometries.

—Staci Boris, Assistant Curator