Painting

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

Painting gathers 16 unpublished colour photographs by Toshio Shibata, organised around constructed landscapes — channels, artificial slopes, engineered terrains, and reshaped landforms. The work proceeds through colour photography with the compositional precision that characterises Shibata's practice: scale cues reduced, structure foregrounded, each image held at a distance that draws infrastructure toward the painterly.

The object is a hardcover concertina of 20 pages, measuring 21 × 27 cm. It can be read as a sequential accordion fold or opened into a single continuous surface. A ribbon on the spine allows the book to be hung vertically, functioning as a hanging scroll — a display logic that repositions the photographs as a wall-mounted sequence rather than a paginated publication.

Shibata studied painting before turning to photography, and that formation remains legible in his method: the suppression of conventional horizon markers, the foregrounding of geometry and surface, the formal stillness with which water management infrastructure and concrete landform are approached. Working with a large-format camera, he produces images of precise detail and deliberate framing. Painting sits within the broader field of Photography & Photobooks as both photographic document and considered art object. Published in English and French, first edition, 9 July 2021.