Toshio Shibata

Legendary photographer Toshio Shibata’s first monograph with Deadbeat Club is a true collaboration between artist and publisher. “I feel like this is a new interpretation of how I moved my subject from the night to the day,” he says of the book. “It even feels like some kind of destiny.” It’s a welcome fate for Shibata’s numerous admirers and collectors, as these 70 black-and-white photographs were made between 1980 and 1988 and have remained unpublished and unseen for some 35 years. The structural concept is seemingly simple: a progression through a sequence of nighttime photographs into a set of images made in the day, but – as always with Shibata – nothing is as straightforward as it first appears. Intense light sources, both indoor and outdoor, make the nocturnal scenes even stranger than they would be if enveloped in darkness. As for the daylight pictures, heavy masses of con- structed earth and stone serve to ground us in a world that is anything but bright and airy. And in the pivot between day and night lies a foreboding tunnel that subsumes both the luminous and the murky. As the title Day For Night implies, it is in Shibata’s camera that light and darkness swap roles. “The title gives another layer to the book,” he says. “I knew that technique since my childhood through watching ‘Rawhide’ on TV but until now I’d never seen my own work with such an eye.” The result is a book that confounds expectations, not only for its viewers, but even for its maker.

best known for his large-scale photographs of civil engineering set in the landscapes of rural Japan. Shibata studied at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts where he received an MFA in 1974. In 1975, he received a fellowship from the Belgian Ministry of Educa- tion to study at the Royal Academy of Ghent. The artist lives and works in Kamakura, Japan. His works are held in the collections of the Metropol- itan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Museum of Con- temporary Art in Chicago.Photography, and his work is held in collections at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Toshio Shibata at Deadbeat Club