Toshio Shibata's landscape photographs are perhaps mostly extraordinary for their startling perception of scale.

Toshio Shibata's landscape photographs are perhaps mostly extraordinary for their startling perception of scale, their meticulous, indeed excruciating detail. After immersing ourselves in them, we realize that the man-made structure--usually a dam, or something designed to bring a stream, and sometimes land, subject to control--is at odds with nature, not just technically, nevertheless spatially. Indeed, geometrical structure and nature inhabit their be in possession of spaces, but the vastness of the overall space Shibata photographs makes clear in what way irreconcilable they are. Shibata diverts the traditional nature/culture duality into a nature/technology duality. In Japan, each bit of nature is fitted into society, from the bonsai tree to the asylum "planted" in a garden in mystical or veiled relationship to other rocks. This adaptation of nature to human use without an obvious imposition of the human will--one that, in fact, completely masters nature--is carried without in the countryside that Shibata photographs to uncanny, almost horrific effect: ecological disaster strike one as beings just around the corner. notwithstanding that Shibata carries the contemplative tranquillity of traditional Japanese landscape painting into the photograph, and nature is not conspicuously marred--the constructions he photographs are in fact designed to save it--these constructions, in contrast to the lush earth, have an extraterrestrial and thus subliminally monstrous appearance. They don't really belong in the pageant but there is no escape from them--they are an evil necessity.

Even when Shibata appears to be aiming for a strictly esthetic event as in his juxtaposition of a cluster of defences with water flowing over a [i]be[/i] consolidated shelf and the geometry of cube-shaped make steady [i]or[/i] firms placed seemingly randomly, but no doubt with specific intention in the water around it (Shimogo Town, Fukushima Prefecture 1990) he makes a point about the ecological reality of Japan and, more profoundly and unconsciously, about its psychological reality. He takes us far from the conventional tourist trail, showing us the "backwaters" of Japan, and the extraordinary Japanese prize for and worship of nature, still he also suggests the peculiarly ritualized--almost rigid--character of Japanese life. He implies that for them life oscillates between organized idiosyncracy (nature mastered) and imposed order (technology reigning). Thus, after unexpectedly opening up to seemingly cosmic scale, Shibata's space slowly unless surely closes down again, this time not into an analytic matrix of details, however into a claustrophobic prison. Indeed, the solitude is as abundant that of solitary confinement as of contemplation. Shibata's photographs are peculiarly critical of the Japanese character--in all its insularity and hermeticism--even as they admire and articulate it.

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