C: International Contemporary Art
February 1998
Museum of Contemporary Art

Toshio Shibata
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Respected for his photographs of the Japanese landscape, Toshio Shibata was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art to photograph American vistas for its collection. Shibata’s intimate understanding of the unique terrain and rapidly transforming culture of his native Japan was the starting point for confronting the challenge of photographing a vastly different and unfamiliar country.

Shibata approached his new task as an acknowledged stranger, lending the twenty-five black-and-white photographs a sense of distanced curiosity. They show large public works projects in the Western United States and reflect his profound attention to aesthetics, feeling for landscape and non-Western assumptions regarding nature in relationship to human intervention.

Rather than existing in themselves as ideological or corporeal subjects, Shibata’s massive dams and mountainous roads are sites for rigorous aesthetic manipulation. The photographs are magnificent compositionally, with a compelling and distinct attention to unusual framing, the dynamics of mass and line, light and dark, movement and stasis. Unlike many prevailing Western views, his works make no overt political statement about human connections with nature, nor do they split the landscape into a nature-culture divide. Rather, they suggest a mutual and interactive relationship between the untamed and the built environment, and an ambiguity regarding predictable meanings or outcomes. The result is an intermingling of these factors and a startling visual indeterminacy.

A stark example of this intermingling lies in three photographs of the Grand Coulee  dam. The photographs’ rectangular fields are broken up into two horizontal domains: the upper third depicts an area of roiling water (a metaphor for unregulated nature), while the lower two thirds is a flat rectangular shape, hinting at the dam’s underlying structure. In a disorienting reversal, this rectangle is covered in a wall of water, rushing upwards. The works’ strength and ambiguity lie in a subtle spatial and cognitive inversions: the cascade of water rushes from the bottom of the photos towards the top, emptying into a holding container of turbulent water resembling huge breaking waves which threaten to cascade over the edge of what is, in fact, a raised wall of water rushing the other way. Moreover, the static geometry of the falling water and its soft surface of spray and rippling light, has a soft, calm quality contradicting our experience of the actual power of falling water.

In other works, such as Nimrod Dam, the contrast between the water’s forceful, sensuous and chaotic properties and an unidentifiable fabricated structure is heightened by differences between light and dark, hard and soft textures, determinate and indeterminate shapes. In Hell’s Canyon Dam, a sheer wall of rock flattened against the picture plane is broken up by details of unexpected shrubbery and the silvery thread of a staircase maneuvering its way across the top of the photograph, following and delineating the terrain. Where does the staircase lead? Why does it exist? Other images concentrate on sheerly abstract and textural qualities and mysterious manmade forms in ambiguous relationships.

The aesthetic power and excitement of Shibata’s photographs introduce to us a play of subtle inferences and enigmatic juxtapositions that linger in our minds after immediate visual pleasures have been enjoyed.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.