Toshio Shibata - CONTACTS - 2013

CONTACTS was published on the occasion of the exhibition "The abstraction of space" dedicated to Toshio Shibata at the Polka Gallery in Paris in September 2013. It gathers a total of 27 color reproductions at contact-size and is accompanied by a text by Marc Feustel in French and in English. Very beautiful print!

“For more than three decades Toshio Shibata has roamed both his native Japan and the United States to photograph landscapes at the intersection of the natural world and the built world. (…) The subject Shibata has chosen, infrastructure, occupies this same territory and his images share the detachment from the subject that characterizes contemporary landscape photography. And yet, they do not carry a critical message… they are more mysterious, more elusive. They invite us to interpret them freely, with the same freedom as that of the photographer when he takes the roads of the Japanese archipelago, remaining open to a fortuitous encounter with the landscape. (…) For his prints, Shibata has always preferred the large format, in order to plunge the viewer into the depths of his photographs. This large scale reveals the extraordinary detail of his images, giving the impression of an enlarged version of reality. However, for the first time, Shibata presented a series of contact prints, measuring no more than a few centimeters in width. By compressing his landscapes borrowed in this way, a new mysterious layer is integrated into the image. Rather than overwhelming us with their scale, their geometric lines and their abstract qualities are revealed to us, making them more delicate, more fragile. These contact prints are the source of inspiration for this book.”