Toshio Shibata’s “LANDSCAPE” is a series of compositional images of concrete retaining walls and erosion control dams in the mountains of Japan. These walls and dams, built with Japan’s advanced civil engineering technology, are strikingly beautiful and well proportioned, but at the same time, they are man-made objects that are incompatible with nature, yet in a sense they symbolize Landscape in modern Japan. This portfolio features six collotype prints of Shibata’s representative works taken in Niigata, Fukushima, Miyazaki, and Tochigi between 1989 and 1990. Please enjoy these prints, which are different from the original Gelatin silver prints.
Toshio Shibata
Born in Tokyo in 1949. After graduating from the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Oil Painting, he entered the photography department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, where he began his photography career in earnest. In 1992, he was selected for the “New Photography 8” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1997, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His works have been collected by many museums in Japan and abroad, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Pompidou Museum of Fine Arts, and many of his books have been published.