Toshio Shibata

Toshio Shibata’s Dam (Nazraeli Press, 2004) operates as a monumental culmination of his decades-long investigation into the uneasy convergence of civil engineering and the natural landscape. Shifting his large-format lens across both the American West and his native Japan, Shibata strips away the overt political or environmental critique often associated with industrial topographics. Instead, he treats colossal infrastructure, hydroelectric barriers, concrete erosion netting, and retaining walls, as inherent elements of a new geologic reality. Within his broader oeuvre, this project solidifies his departure from pure nature photography, presenting human intervention not as a scar, but as a structural evolution of the earth's surface.

The visual language of the book is characterized by an abstract, flattened monumentality. By eliminating skies, horizons, and recognizable scales of reference, Shibata isolates the geometric rhythms of poured concrete against the organic chaos of water and rock. The resulting compositions are highly graphic, emphasizing the structural weight and spatial dynamics of these engineering marvels. The sheer scale of the oversized 14-by-17-inch volume, coupled with the rich, deep blacks of the duotone plates, transforms these utilitarian barriers into majestic, almost calligraphic abstractions that dominate the viewer's field of vision.

Special edition of the book which came with two choices of prints, each in an edition of 20.

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.

This is Nazraeli Photobook Two #51, which is issued with a signed unnumbered print.