In the early 1980s, after several years of living and travelling in Europe, Toshio Shibata returned to Japan and began photographing the roadside at night. Driving through darkness, he found that place seemed to dissolve: the highway could have been in Japan or the United States, the scene not specific but generic, almost archetypal. Gas stations, especially in the dead of night, look more or less the same wherever they are found. Shibata’s seven photographs of Japanese filling stations from 1982 and 1986 take that sameness as their subject and discover in it a mood that can tip toward melancholy, even romance.
Shibata occupies a particular position in landscape photography. His pictures do not idealize pristine wilderness, nor do they moralize about the damage people leave on the natural world. Instead they study places of contact, where the earth has been altered, and find reflection, wonder, and awe. Beauty in his work is inclusive, and purity is a matter of compositional elegance rather than rarefied subject matter. He is widely known for large-scale photographs of large-scale civil engineering in rural places, both in Japan and the West; here he turns to more ordinary infrastructure, and the result is a concentrated study of how light, structure, and repetition can transform the banal into something reflective.
The book belongs to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, and its form is inseparable from its meaning. A hardcover volume of sixteen pages, it holds seven duotone plates reproduced with the jewellike precision for which the publisher is known. The small scale asks for close attention rather than spectacle, allowing the quiet theatricality of illuminated pumps and empty forecourts to register fully. The book is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5×7 inch original print, a silver gelatin photograph hand printed and signed by the artist. Beyond the print, the volume is a self-contained sequence that stands apart from Shibata’s larger landscape work, and its night views of gas stations have become a distinctive chapter in his exploration of the built environment.
Gas Stations brings Shibata’s sensibility to a subject at once utterly familiar and strangely anonymous, and in doing so it holds a place of its own within his catalogue.
