Toshio Shibata built his reputation on a distinctive kind of infrastructure photography: dams, retaining walls, and engineered slopes rendered with a formality that often reads as abstract. Painting, published by Chose Commune in 2021, turns that sensibility toward a set of sixteen previously unpublished colour photographs in which constructed terrain and natural landscape are difficult to separate. The title is not decorative. Shibata studied painting before he took up the camera, and these pictures acknowledge that inheritance — composition treated as an organising act, surface and structure weighed against one another, beauty arrived at rather than merely found.
The book is a leporello, a concertina that opens into a continuous run of images rather than a sequence of separate pages. The format asks to be read as a movement through space; the photographs unfold in succession. A ribbon at the spine allows the whole to be suspended vertically, an explicit nod to the kakemono, the Japanese hanging scroll. The reference is deliberate and double: to a painting tradition and to a mode of display in which a single work occupies a wall and holds a room. Twenty pages, sixteen plates, 21 by 27 centimetres, hardcover, with text in English and French — a modest object by count, but one whose physical logic governs how the photographs are encountered.
Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi directed the editorial work; Akiko Wakabayashi designed the book. Their contributions belong to the object’s conception as much as to its manufacture, and the result is a volume in which structure, sequence, and image are argued together rather than illustrated side by side. Shibata is the sole photographer of the sixteen plates.
For a collector, the interest lies in that argument. Here is a photographer whose subject is the meeting of the built and the geological, working in a format that refuses the ordinary page and proposes instead a continuous, potentially hanging image field. It is a considered piece of bookmaking from a small publisher, and it treats the photobook as an instrument for looking rather than a container for pictures.
