Toshio Shibata
Given an open-ended commission from the MCA to create a body of work in America, why did Shibata select this charged subject? Quite simply, he explained at his show’s recent opening, dams were familiar from his work in Japan. The photographer both sidestepped and invited a political reading by explaining that he prefers not to “narrow” the significance of the images. And certainly some leeway should be given for translation from one culture to another. In Japan–where the word “nature” cannot be confused with its American synonym, “wilderness”–intervening in natural processes is not necessarily seen as a violation. Hence Japanese gardeners’ elaborate efforts to improve upon nature using nature’s own principles. Dams represent yet another opportunity to exercise the brilliance of Japanese design. But in America such projects tend to vacillate between the attitudes of triumph and apology. Shibata wrote in a letter to MCA curator Staci Boris that, “in Japan, these constructions are exposed to the public proudly….
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Seen in this light, Shibata’s subject is politics of a metaphysical sort. In his ongoing obsession with dams, he photographs an encounter with the most elemental and least controllable force at work in our lives: time. His model for our encounter with time is a struggle between the forces of nature and human objects. John Szarkowski has observed that “whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography.” Certainly in this case he’s perfectly right.
