TOSHIO SHIBATA : JAPAN

A comprehensive monograph on Toshio Shibata, one of Japan’s most highly regarded photographers.

Among Shibata’s many publications, this is the only monograph available in English. Page after page presents his meticulously detailed photographs, capturing the relationship between human-made structures and the natural world.

Shibata’s contemporary landscape photographs, taken with a large-format camera, are defined by their haunting beauty, refined compositions, and astonishing precision. Often using long exposures, he eliminates figures, horizons, and identifiable landmarks as much as possible, instead focusing on dams, bridges, reservoirs, and roads as they interact with mountainsides, rivers, forests, and fields. The resulting images reveal rhythmic patterns, flowing lines, and painterly compositions that resonate with a distinctly Japanese aesthetic.

Curated and introduced by Phillip Prodger, one of the most knowledgeable critics in contemporary photography, who has served as Head of Photographs at London’s National Portrait Gallery and as the founding curator of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

This book is not only an essential volume for admirers of Shibata’s work but also an enthralling introduction for those encountering his extraordinary vision for the first time.