Geo topo.

Toshio Shibata: Landscape

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Tokyo

December 13, 2008-February 8, 2009

Toshio Shibata is known for photographs of civil engineering projects in the Japanese countryside dams, spillways, channel linings, roadside retaining walls, and gabions--that have transformed mountain and Stream into geometrical earthwork. Hillsides appear as warped grids or monumental tessellated surfaces, channels as stepped troughs with sharply zigzagging walls. There are other sorts of photographs in his oeuvre for example, his early "Night Photos" series (1982-86), consisting of crisp shots mainly of tollbooths and rest stops along the Tomei Expressway but such divergent series are few. For Shibata, geometrical topography approaches die status of a monomania, a fact made clear in "Landscape," the partial retrospective of Shibata's work recently held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

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Shibata exhibited the first of his hallmark civil engineering photographs in 1984. These were small silver gelatin prints depicting mainly roadside retaining walls, some faced with a clean masonry mosaic, some bare, unpolished concrete. The photographs' size (shot with a 4 x 5-inch format camera) and relative lack of affect--making them appear somewhat like photo-conceptual documents--were not features Shibata would later pursue. In 1988, he began a new series of photographs on the theme of civil engineering, taken with an 8 x 10-inch format camera and printed in the dimensions of exhibition art. Typical of the series is a photograph of a concrete retaining wall, taken in 1989 in Fukushima Prefecture, located in the Japanese countryside. The photograph foregrounds the interfusion of conflicting topologies; in this case, the rolling, protuberant topography of mountain terrain and the regular geometry of the grid. Shibata's photographs often strike a resonant chord with the formal concerns of post-minimalism. He often uses tight cropping to reinforce this connection, isolating engineering structure as independent tableau or sculptural installation. at the same time employing a wide-angle lens to flatten 3D form into geometrical pattern. It is not so evident in their miniaturized print publication, but exhibited, the effect is often optical; the serial hanging of the photographs in "Landscape" produced a continual oscillation between surface plane and dimensional bulge.

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Shibata has stated his admiration for Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. His photographs should be set against their Point Lobos photographs of twisted cypress and eroded rock. In that dialogue. Shibata's undulating and cellular structures begin to speak the language of mid-century vitalism. This is not necessarily in conflict with the geometrical cast of his vision of nature. Shibata began photographing civil engineering structures in the early to mid 1980s, gaining widespread recognition circa 1990, which coincides with a decade of rapid developments and rising popular interest in computer imaging technologies. The name "fractal landscape" assumed particular importance, for it showed that fairly naturalistic landscapes could be generated with basic algorithms and raised the possibility that a certain mathematical order was at work in the generation of complex and irregular forms of natural topography. There is a striking similarity between a number of Shibata's photographs and computer generated "fractal mountains" of the most rudimentary kind or wireframe terrains found in early computer flight and tank simulators.

In this light, Shibata's photography appears as a fundamentally different sort of statement in the discourse on landscape. Take his 1990 image of a spillway shot in Miyazaki Prefecture, another toponym that evokes hinterland. Surrounding rockface has been covered in concrete to retard erosion and dissipate the energy of falling water. From a traditional formal perspective -that of geometrical abstraction--topography has been simplified into stepped, rectilinear masses. One knows the structure came second but one can also imagine it to have come first; the untouched crags to the far left appear as the final simulations! touches added to this geometrical scaffolding and core. Ostensibly images of radical landscaping, Shibata's photographs can also be understood within the paradigm of computer imaging, as metaphors of modeling real-life renderings of computer-generated terrain. Given the then-contemporary discourse on fractals, this reading might be pushed one step further; perhaps his photographs even imagine that geometries are the underlying structure of the topography itself, and not just the engineering principal of its concrete covering, as if engineered superstructure signifies, by a universal logic of design, deepest generative substructure.

Shibata's recent work supports this idea. In 2004, he turned to color; subject matter, size, and formal concerns remain largely unchanged. Many images show public works aged with mildew, water stains, and overgrowth. Others show them as perfect aesthetic compliments to the texture and colors of surrounding grasses and trees. The color photographs are statements on the assimilation of civil engineering projects into nature. Odd new intrusions in the black-and-white photographs of the late 1980s and early '90s are now a naturalized part of the Japanese landscape. Yet, one should also read them as extensions of the modeling discourse of the earlier series. As such, overgrowth and wear are, like the rock crags of before, naturalistic touches to the frame below. It is notable that among these new chromogenic prints one also finds images of agriculture plantings in strict rows and columns, captured in states of growth and harvest in which the organizing geometry is at a preparatory mapping stage, like a set of vertices readied to create vectors. Agriculture is a further indication that, for Shibara, landscape is generated through geometry and not just shaped by it after the fact.

RYAN HOLMBERG is a writer and art historian specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art and visual culture.