Lone Pine is the fifty-second entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series: a sixteen-page hardcover containing fifteen four-color plates. Toshio Shibata made the work after a summer 2024 road trip that began in Los Angeles, followed the Central Coast to Paso Robles, and turned east toward Nipton, Lone Pine, and the Mojave Desert. Lone Pine, a town long associated with Western films, held a particular charge for him. As a boy in 1950s and 1960s Tokyo, he watched those movies. Now he walked their backstage towns, finding, as he describes it, no boundary between the dream world and reality and little sense of the three-quarters of a century that had passed.
That doubled vision is the project’s subject. Shibata is among the most widely collected Japanese landscape photographers, with work in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, among others. In Lone Pine, the landscape tradition he has practiced for decades meets a subject that is at once cinematic, geological, and remembered. The book is not a travelogue or a film-history survey. It is a compact sequence in which a landscape photographer looks at the ground beneath an image he has carried since childhood.
Form carries the argument. Fifteen plates across sixteen pages impose the discipline of a suite rather than a monograph; without extensive text, the sequencing must do the work, and the small scale keeps the reader moving at the pace of a road trip. Each copy includes a 5×7 inch original print signed by the artist, and the edition is limited to 500 numbered copies. Within the One Picture Book Two series, Lone Pine is a place-specific, personal project by a photographer whose institutional standing is firmly established.
For collectors, the interest lies in that convergence: Shibata’s reputation and museum presence; the meeting of Japanese landscape practice, California film history, and memoir; and a publication whose limited, numbered format includes a signed original print. It is a concentrated work, and its weight comes from what Shibata does with one place and one remembered image, not from scale or comprehensiveness.
