Painting

Painting — a leporello photobook by Toshio Shibata, published by Chose Commune

Painting brings together 16 unpublished colour photographs by Toshio Shibata, gathered around constructed landscapes — drainage channels, artificial slopes, engineered terrain, and reshaped ground. Scale and horizon are held back; structure and surface come forward. Shibata studied painting before turning to photography, and that early formation is legible throughout: infrastructure is approached not as document but as composition, organised into fields of colour and geometry that draw concrete and rock toward the condition of a painted image.

The object matches its subject. Painting is a hardcover concertina of 20 pages, measuring 21 × 27 cm, that can be read as a sequential fold or opened flat into a single continuous surface. A ribbon on the spine allows it to be hung vertically, in the manner of a kakemono — the Japanese hanging scroll tradition — turning the sequence of photographs into a wall-mounted image rather than a paginated one.

Working with a large-format camera, Shibata produces images of exacting detail and deliberate framing, images that sit within the wider field of Photography & Photobooks and within the broader context of Japanese photobook publishing. Readers of this title may also want to look at Boundary Hunt, another study of Shibata's constructed landscapes. Painting is published in English and French as a first edition, dated 9 July 2021.

About Toshio Shibata

Born in Tokyo in 1949, Toshio Shibata (柴田敏雄) is a Japanese photographer whose work is grounded in the relationship between human engineering and natural terrain. Working with a large-format camera, he produces compositions of precise detail and deliberate framing — images in which conventional markers of scale and horizon are often suppressed in favour of structural clarity.

Shibata studied painting before moving into photography, and that formation shapes his approach to the constructed landscape: water management infrastructure, concrete channels, and reshaped landforms are treated not as documentary subjects but as formal fields — organised surfaces of colour, texture, and geometry. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are held in significant museum collections.