Boundary Hunt – Toshio Shibata
Made between 2000 and 2004 across Japan and the United States, Boundary Hunt documents Toshio Shibata's sustained attention to the places where infrastructure meets landscape — concrete channels, retaining structures, engineered waterways held against or alongside natural terrain. The 34 black-and-white photographs gathered here were shot on Polaroid Type 55 film, and most are published for the first time. Published by Photography & Photobooks specialist Poursuite Editions in 2021, the book arrives as a considered document of a transitional period in Shibata's practice.
The Type 55 Border
Polaroid Type 55 is a black-and-white positive film with a recoverable negative, capable of yielding enlargeable prints. Its defining characteristic — an irregular, chemically formed border around each exposure — became central to this series. Rather than cropping it away, Shibata chose to incorporate the border into the image itself, letting it enter into dialogue with the landscapes it framed. In his afterword, included in English, he writes: "The imperfection of the Type 55 film border has always fascinated me. When I look at the resulting image, I find myself on the boundary between a photograph and an art drawing." The series title carries both meanings: the threshold between the natural and man-made world that Shibata has long inhabited as a subject, and the literal edge drawn by the film around each image.
Shibata's Practice
Infrastructure has been Shibata's central subject since the early 1980s — not as symbol or critique, but as form: structures that are both products of the modern world and, in their scale and permanence, strangely resistant to it. His training in oil painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music (BFA 1972, MFA 1974) left a visible trace in his compositional approach, in the tension between concreteness and abstraction that runs through his work. Works by Toshio Shibata are held in major international collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A further title by the same artist — Painting — is also available at Lokator100.
