Toshio Shibata

Night Photographs

Toshio Shibata

Born in 1949 in Tokyo, Japan

What moves a photographer like Toshio Shibata to create, with "Night Photographs," such a "dark" series? Is it a taste for a revelation of the void? Or for vertigo induced by darkness? Japanese artist of the post-war generation, Toshio Shibata has conducted photographic studies of landscapes for many years. He is well-known for his images of monumental infrastructures - dams, bridges, large construction works (see Polka #23) - for which he obtained special priveleges in the United State that helped him create, for example, the famous images of the Grand Coulee Dam. Inspired by the American photography movement, "New Topographics", Shibata works in a similar fashion from the Japanese archipelago, capturing human intervention in natural landscapes.Read more

These "Night Photographs" hold a particular place in the make-up of the artist. This series, having been taken in the 1980s and only recently brought to light, was extracted from his archives. It consists of black and white images, while he currently works with color, which were taken exclusively at night. The outcome of these photographs is reminiscent of the artist himself, as his choice of black and white dramatizes his process and above all, the nightly dimension encompassing the subjects lends itself a certain strangeness. Even without the author appearing, there is the feeling of an autobiographical imprint, and an internal search that drives the photographer like a flashback to the source of his work, into his own primitive night.

These dense and poetic images are comparatively different than his photographs of infrastructures through a certain coldness... the "cool", as Shibata calls it. Without a doubt, he is referring to the mistrust in his commitments. Shibata is different from his predecessors, such as the Japanese photographers Nobuyoshi Araki or Daido Moriyama, whose photographic language is rough, "hot", and marked by the struggles of the country during the 1960s. Shibata grew up in an economic superpower, capable and guilty of sacrificing a part of itself, of its past, to materialism, and whose long-term emblems are cars and power plants.

"Towards the end of the 1970s," Shibata explained, "Japan began to calm down after the turbulences that had agitated the country after the war - reconstruction, protests, terrorism... The calm atmosphere of the beginning of the 1980s coincided with the appearance of an economic snowball that grew larger and larger, like a wave, and accompanied the end of the Showa period (1926-1989). I returned after four years of studying in Finland, in a Europe where time passed slowly. With occidentalism and the chaos sparked by a combination of traditions from the ancient Showa period (before the war) and those of the modern era (the 1950s until 1989), Tokyo seemed to be in a disorder that made it impossible for me to capture a visual reality. I battled with myself trying to create a clean series in my country, so I thought I could begin by chasing light in the darkness. It was a way to escape the daily clamor."

Marc Feustel, a specialist in Japanese photography, confirms "Shibata has identified 'his' subject: the road. This subject has a universal character that could be the same in Europe, America, or Japan... This is an interesting idea for those who wish to understand these landscapes taken by someone in a modern world, without age nor borders." If the road is a privileged subject of photography of the 19th century, it is due to the birth of a civilization of mobility, bringing about a new world: service stations, different architecture, parking structures, interchanges, etc. The French ethnologist Marc Augé defined these as "non-places" - urban blocks without a history, identity, or people: A life thereby organized in a world around humanity in transit. In his series, Shibata adds darkness to this life, because he enjoyed, as Feustel described "taking his car at night and driving with no destination in mind," like a butterfly at night attracted by the light. Is it a desire to roam and drift? A poetic practice of getting lost in anonymous and deserted places? To be drunk on nothing? Who really knows...

So, are these "Night Photographs" apparitions in the darkness?  In a country that, according to the writer Junichiro Tanizaki, "praises the darkness", Shibata celebrates the light. But which kind? In ancient times, light was given two names: "lux" and "lumen". In the modern era we added a third: "flash". "Lux" refers to daylight, "Lumen", the miracle of the lightbulb and neon, and finally, the "flash", a lightning strike, or photographic artifact. Shibata captures the variation of the sole "lumen", this electric beam that sculpts and snatches forms in the night. The insomniac of the highway plays with all of these states of glow the create his world. He has a vast vocabulary of light: stroke, outline, cut out, material, middle, volume. The desks in the windows uniformly lit, the deserted service stations, geometric figures cut in the darkness, large urinals in a perfect line, drowned in white, parking structures devoured by the shadow of an absolute darkness are therefore the snapshots of this struggle between darkness and light, between night and day. Until the triumph, like it was dreamt of, in the 14th century, the orthodox theologian Grégoire Palamas, "a day without night." But whilst waiting, the night ruled. Shibata the traveler and the spy. For more than thirty years, like a modern-day Katsushika Hokusai -- the author of "Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji" -- he has not let go of the night, the strange territory of his obsession.

These nocturnes hold the silence. The places tremble from no sound, besides the wind that we can see is stirring the palm trees, lightly blurred, of a coconut tree behind a trash bin on the side of the road. Here, the night hosts neither the soul nor humanity, except one under an ectoplasmic form, a prisoner in a telephone booth that is being suffocated by a single neon light. Is there not a more cruel metaphor for the night, the scene of the crime, having been attacked with solitude and soliloquy? Shibata's "Night Photographs" oscillate between a description of the night as it is and the temptation of an enigmatic narrative. What happened? Where have all of the people gone? The artist, like a "cool" jazz player, prefers improvisation over a constructed narrative. He composes similar to the way he drives, without a destination nor goal. There is a slow horizontal panoramic, a car window, captures taken through buildings - interior, night exterior, nature - cars, trucks stopped, and symbols. Here or there, in this Japan that has become an "empire of signs," insinuating, immobile and without majesty, ideograms, pictograms of the toilet or a sign for a restaurant, the Venus, an obsolete symbol and a derisory reminder of what the night owes to Eros.

Thierry Grillet